PEOPLE joke about Gavin Williamson being a bit silly, but I have to say, when you come face to face with the Defence Secretary, the unbearable lightness of Gavin is a bit of a shock.

Even Tory-supporting paper the Sun makes fun of Williamson. This year it reported that he had “lost the plot” and was wasting time with daft ideas like saving money by “putting really expensive guns” on farmyard tractors.

Williamson has also been mocked because he had a pet tarantula when he was a Tory whip, which looked like a teenage boy’s attempt to be moody and scary.

The Sun said an official had told them that “Williamson is mucking about with his spider and coming up with crazy suggestions. The man is out of his mind. His behaviour is totally bizarre and no-one knows what to do.”

Williamson, in demanding after the Salisbury poisoning that “Russia should go away and should shut up” was also seen as a sign he is a small man trying, and failing, to puff himself up into a big man.
Is this an exaggeration? I don’t think so.

When I saw Williamson speak at the Tory conference, he did come across as a mix of the wet and the weird. The fact he is the actual, real defence secretary, in charge of our soldiers and warplanes, this is worrying.

Williamson was speaking at an early morning fringe meeting in one of the largest halls in Birmingham’s Convention Centre (ICC) during the October party conference.  

Only around 100 delegates had come to the 800-seater hall. Williamson clearly thinks Tories like him more than they do.

The meeting was “sponsored” by arms firm Raytheon which makes the Paveway guided bomb which the Saudis used to blow up a wedding in the Yemen war.

Raytheon’s friends have been lobbying hard against any ban on arms sales to Saudi Arabia over the Yemen war, because they have billions more weapons to sell.

But Williamson was embarrassingly grateful to Raytheon for paying for his not very popular gig.

“I love Raytheon and thanks for sponsoring us” he gushed. He certainly couldn’t have afforded the hire of the hall if they’d charged the sparse audience for tickets.

Williamson loves arms firms and he loves trying to sound tough. It sounded like overcompensation, but that can be dangerous.

He tried to make the case for more war, saying: “I think our confidence was knocked  by the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of, actually, we became too timid in terms of saying do we get involved.”

But Williamson doesn’t want to seem timid, even though it makes him seem like a small man trying to be big.

He went on: “Actually I think what we’ve been doing in Afghanistan and the strikes that we conducted in Syria earlier on this year, this is actually us rediscovering the fact that intervention, intervention, when it is thought through, when it is properly considered, is the right thing to do.”

So his weakness makes him a bit keener on war. What made him look really weak was his attitude to Isabel Oakeshott, who was interviewing him for the event.
 

Oakeshott is a former journalist who now works as a ghost writer for Tory billionaire Lord Ashcroft. Between the two of them, Ashcroft and Oakeshott are a tawdry crew.

Ashcroft got cross with David Cameron when he refused to make him a minister. Ashcroft thought he deserved the job because he was a big Tory donor.

Cameron showed rare principle by refusing to sell ministerial jobs. In a tantrum, Ashcroft got Oakeshott to help him write a “biography” of Cameron with cheesy and unsupported claims about Dave and a pig’s head.

Cameron may be all kinds of bad, but this wasn’t journalism, it was childish smear.

Ashcroft has now written a book about the army with Oakeshott called White Flag. Ashcroft also helped fund Williamson’s conference meeting. Oakeshott tried to turn the “in conversation” event with the defence secretary into a tacky promo for the book. And Williamson let her.

Williamson spoke in front of four display banners — two for Raytheon and two for White Flag. The defence secretary looked like he was doing a promo for bombs and books.
 

Oakeshott spent much time burbling on about “the book I helped Lord Ashcroft write.” She claimed that “Lord Ashcroft has a big background in defence” because he “collects Victoria Crosses.”
This Is both true and absurd.

Ashcroft, who has never served in the armed forces, thinks he knows about bravery because he buys old medals. He literally thinks he knows about soldiering because be bought dead soldiers’ things.

Williamson again and again deferred to Oakeshott, despite the absurdity of seeing her or Ashcroft as serious figures, when she said: “I’d like to move on to the heart of this book,” “It’s definitely something we explore in the book,” “One of the impetuses for this project [the book].”  

Williamson repeatedly let Oakeshott divert a discussion with the defence secretary — himself — in the heart of Tory conference into a cheap sales pitch.

Williamson’s only way out was an embarrassing attempt to talk tough. He tried to win back the room by declaring: “I will give my absolute everything to trying to do my very best” to support the military, launching into a meant-to-be-rousing-but-embarrassing speech.

“I just want to see that actually Britain just grows, it becomes a nation whose voice is listened to more, people step back and take note of what Britain says because we don’t just talk about values, we stand behind them and actually we have the ability to stand.”

Even then Oakeshott made fun of him, following his Pound Shop Churchill moment by saying: “I totally feel that we need a kind of musical finale here, Land of Hope and Glory or something.”

What the weakness of Williamson says is that this government is played out. Their best players have already been injured and are off. They are down to the subs.

It means the Tories are weak, which is good, but it also means that for now men like Williamson are actually in charge of our war machine, which is very bad.