A Rare Defence of Sir Gavin Williamson

The Man who Saved Britain: an Encomium for Sir Gavin Williamson 

There have been many attempted character assassinations performed by the left on Conservative politicians: the appalling recent attack ad on the Prime Minister, an example so egregious is barely bears repeating; the baseless attempt to question his integrity over his wife’s non-domiciled status, for no more than continuing the policy of decades of Conservative governance; the mockery Greg Hands has been subjected to for educating people on the effects of Socialist economic policy; are just a few examples.

 Never, however, has an attempt at destruction been so complete, so effective, as in the case of Sir Gavin Williamson.  Attacked by both the left and certain quarters in our own party, stripped of his right to attend Her late Majesty’s funeral and then baselessly accused of bullying for daring to question the political discrimination he was subjected to by supporters of the former Prime Minister Liz Truss, it seems Sir Gavin has returned to the backbenches for a good while.

 Let us, however, remember what we owe to this man; let us remind ourselves how baseless, how unfair and how scathing the vitriol he has been subjected to has been.  Let us try to see him for what he really is: a hard-working minster who has striven to reform and improve every department he has been in, very often successfully, willing to attract the ire of civil servants and Unions where he thought the national interest demanded it; a strong voice for pupils in lockdown and an opponent of excessive restrictions which so heavily damaged children’s education during the pandemic; a champion of good causes and an unapologetic voice for the values and virtues of the Conservative party.

 It was a cold, dark morning in Maidenhead; the lovely climate and sunny weather so typical of that summer were nowhere to be seen. The Prime Minister emerged, haggard and exhausted, the telltale signs of recent weeping clear on her face.  Her speech was short, unadorned: what Lucretius would have called acosmos: belying the historic import of the moment; as she was bundled into her car and driven to London, the question of what to do and say next: how to handle her critically weakened government, how to stitch together an arrangement that could actually rule Britain: was on everyone’s lips.

It was here that Sir Gavin stepped in.  Whatever panic and frustration had been instilled that morning in every Conservative MP, the Chief Whip’s brow was firm and unbending.  As he spoke to Mrs May, still his good friend, that morning, there was one crucial matter in his mind: never to allow Jeremy Corbyn, no matter what the cost, what deal had to be made and with whom, to become Prime Minister.  The negotiations that followed, though difficult and long, yielded a deal: a deal that, however torrid and difficult the next few years would be, saved Britain from the horror of a man like Corbyn: an apologist for tyranny and terror who preferred to look on in indolence and sloth than properly address the appalling antisemitism in the ranks of his own political base: succeeding Mrs Thatcher and Disraeli in the highest office of public service.   

 Indeed that was only the high point of an illustrious career as chief whip: in that office, he was universally recognised as the most effective manager of party discipline in decades.  There may be some who deride this rôle as unworthy, who argue that being able to persuade the Parliamentary party to follow the government line is something to be condemned, not celebrated; but could there be a more profound misunderstanding of the British political system?  If manifestos do not show to voters what a party hopes to achieve, what does?  If every MP, especially in a Parliament as finely balanced as both Mrs May’s and Mr Cameron’s, refuses to follow the policy of the government he is supporting, how can the country be governed?  Finally, the rôle of a chief whip works both ways, and it was Sir Gavin that, time and again, told the government when a policy was hopeless, or would fail to gain the confidence of MPs.  Sir Gavin took a difficult job in perhaps the most difficult circumstances a chief whip had faced in decades, and drew universal accolades for his performance.

 Moving on to his admirable tenure as defence Secretary: what mockery and what scorn Sir Gavin’s stern response to the Salisbury poisoning crisis drew!  And yet, looking back, was he not totally right?  Perhaps if Russia had heeded his advice to ‘shut up and go away,’ which he has rightly refused to apologise for providing, such tragedies as Russia’s bloody, illegal war of aggression in Ukraine would never have occurred.  Similarly, his strong stand on issues of security and deployment of the British aircraft carrier in the Pacific showed a rare foresight as to what the future of international relations would hold.  There were concerns on Sir Gavin’s appointment that he, a man who is not a soldier (though he easily could be) despite having many family members in the army, would not be a strong voice for our armed forces; these doubters were triumphantly silenced when Sir Gavin proved a vociferous defender of our soldiers, securing record funding and not being afraid to risk his own political capital to secure resources for our troops. 

It is, however, a sad reality in our politics that such boldness and effectiveness often arouses jealousy in lesser minds; it was now that Sir Gavin paid for his political courage.

In a political show trial, performed before a one-woman kangaroo court, Theresa May applied a standard that no court of law would accept to accuse Sir Gavin of leaking confidential information about the disgraceful decision to grant a company with deep links to an unfriendly foreign power a rôle in providing the UK’s 5G network.  No presumption of innocence was applied; no due process.  A telephone call to a Telegraph editor was wrangled out of context and twisted around, as if no-one else in that meeting could have leaked. 

Sir Gavin’s response was stoic, dignified; he refused to resign: if Theresa May wanted him gone, she would have to wield the executioner’s axe herself.  His letter of response, so full of righteous anger at his appalling treatment, exposed the disgraceful way his dismissal had been handled; in a manner so alike to a Patrician being call to trial by a demagogical tribune in Livy, standing boldly in full confidence of his innocence, he stood as a shining torch illuminating the truth. 

It made a wonderful contrast with the post he created the following day, the final nail in the coffin of those who accused him:  

the face of innocence, if ever there was one!

It is now I would like to mention one of Sir Gavin’s most admirable campaigns: an area where he has shown truly heroic persistence and resisted the forces of evil and oppression to fight for the sovereignty of a proud, independent people: the Somalilanders.

It was a bright, beautiful afternoon in Hargeisa, the pounding sun of the Horn of Africa beating down.  The streets were packed, an atmosphere of jubilation not inferior to that of the great Carnival of Rio.  And yet, there was also something else: a sincerity, a pride and determination swept over the assembled crowd.  A cheer spread over the mass of faces as the man they had come to see finally arrived: as children spread flowers over the streets and even the old men looked on from their windows, he walked through the streets, his confident visage scarcely betraying how profoundly moved he was by the people’s love.  As he moved through the great assembly, not less than half bore banners and signs emblazoned with the words, imperfectly rendered but sincerely meant: ‘THAN YOU, GAVEN WILLIAMSON.’  As Sir Gavin, their hero, and his staff, moved through the streets, songs and applause erupted through the throng.  At last, after years of distant support, of speeches, entreaties, articles and meetings to support them: to give his voice to a people ignored by nearly everyone: he was here.  The Somalilanders had waited for years for this champion of their nationhood, and they were going to make his visit a memorable one.

That nation, which has for decades been struggling to be free, is one of the most just, modern and democratic societies in Africa.  Adjacent to a Somalia still wracked with conflict and discord, and yet illicitly claiming to have dominion over it, it has built modern, Western-style institutions: courts, a Parliament, systems of government: in short, it is an oasis of democracy and peace in a troubled region.  Yet, the UN, the EU and most international organisations, as well as nearly every nation state, has been refusing to recognise its existence.  It is shameful how little attention this struggle for freedom gets in the UK: it is almost as if we were not confident enough in our values to fight for them abroad.  It is a great vindication to see our nation and its representatives greeted abroad as the harbingers of an international recognition that might finally bring stability and political permanence to the people of Somaliland.

Back home, too, it was not long before Sir Gavin’s exile was ended: and here too, when he returned, it was like Cicero, escorted through the streets in jubilation.  Justly rehabilitated after an appalling relegation, it was now that his hour had come.  Who could be better to be a leading luminary in the leadership campaign of the man who would finally deliver Brexit and unify the country, Boris Johnson, than he? 

Very soon Sir Gavin was back; this time, it would fall to him to initiate a golden age in British education, to finally resolve the issues which had plagued the sector for so many decades.

The work started immediately, and was undertaken with resolve: funding increases were secured, an ambitious project to finally destroy the gap between practical and academic options was put into place; I still remember, in those heady days, Sir Gavin’s excellent conference speech: in Manchester no less! : a clarion call for those who believe that it is finally time for the obscene discrimination of skills-based education, which has plagued this country since Tony Blair’s obsession with half the populace going to university, if not longer, to end.  Those of us still at school at the time will remember the flurry of excitement that this new wave of reform brought: finally, it seemed, British education would become in a world leader in all sectors.  Furthermore, he took bold steps to smash the mania of censorship and de-platforming, a scourge so common in UK universities, finally putting forward an imaginative framework to make such a lofty goal possible.

It is a tragic irony how often in history great men, at the cusp of their triumph, are suddenly afflicted by terrible trials outside their control; how, once they have built a new order and finally have the power to govern according the great precepts which form the foundation of their stature in affairs of state, the ground under the feet is snatched from underneath them.  Can this not be said of Theodosius?  It was when that great emperor had established the empire in peace under right rulership and right religion, when the trials of the past century seemed to have finally abated, that the usurping Eugenius was granted the Western throne by a barbarian and caused yet another civil war: now, indeed, it was one from which the empire, soon left to Theodosius’s indolent sons, would never recover.

For then came on the dark night of COVID; under the pressure of restrictions, exam cancellations and lockdowns, all these bright lights were, one by one, extinguished.  It is not just that the public health crisis was ghastly: Sir Gavin, after all, did his best to alleviate it.  It was the refusal from on high to give enough resources to properly facilitate learning burdened by COVID, and most importantly the funding needed to fix the gaps in learning the epidemic caused, and find the children who dropped from the records in those times, that made the crisis really severe.  And yet, through this time of struggle, who if not Sir Gavin was there defending schoolchildren from being targeted in lockdown after lockdown?  Who else devised an ingenious system of predicted grades, supported by Unions, teachers and parents, later much maligned: perhaps rightly, exams should have certainly gone ahead: but a sound attempt to fix what was fundamentally an unresolvable problem where planning A-levels and GCSEs had become politically implausible.  We all still remember the authority, the gravitas with which Sir Gavin delivered his government press briefings on education, as a grateful nation listened on.

The great chiming press chorus chides us, incessantly: but behold this awful man, this destroyer of the youth, he who ruined our children’s education!  Did he not make that monstrous algorithm, did he not cause Susie from Basingstoke to get a B, not an A, in her exams?

Nonsense, I say!  For what all these pontificating press types always fail to say is the following: what other option was there?  Who, as the system was being prepared, ever had a different idea?  And as for those results, those statistical analyses which all the wise men of the media held up to blame the framework for every ill of the world: it was Tony Blair: alas, another disastrous change: that instituted the rule that the Education Secretary cannot even see the statistical changes in results before they are published.  And yet who blames him?

But alas, once more the wiles of those who wished Sir Gavin ill won out; after an illustrious two-year tenure, his attempts to secure funding for the millions of children profoundly affected by lockdown rebuked time and again, he returned to the backbenches.

I shall not recount in detail the latest smear campaign we have all been forced to witness: say how chronically the Truss administration failed to engage political opponents, how right Sir Gavin, already stressed with his sickly dog, was to make the valid points he did about the utter exclusion of anyone favourable to Mr Sunak from that great national moment, the funeral of the Queen.  All I will say is that every time he has been vanquished before, Sir Gavin has returned, resurgent.  It is my sincere hope that he will do so again.

There are those in politics whose time comes in one administration and soon wanes; others who, through their blandness and lack of ideas, never seem to go away; finally, those men of ambition and principle, whose victories are as impressive as their falls; whose lives in national affairs represent the one thing our modern politics so lacks: personality and substance.  The voice of Sir Gavin has never been silent for long in British politics.  If the likes of those who have engineered this most recent witch hunt, eager for their own power and the supremacy of their own faction in the party, finally manage to quash it, it will be a most diabolical shame.

Franek Bednarski (Treasurer) is a 2nd Year Undergraduate at Jesus College reading Classics

Image Credit: Royal Navy under Creative Commons Licence