You expect a defence secretary to boom, not bleat

According to the Tories’ official website, Gavin Williamson is 41 years old. Incredible. He doesn’t look a day over 19. Less flatteringly, he doesn’t sound a day over 19, either. His voice is so weedy, so nasal, so gawkily adolescent. You expect a Defence Secretary to boom. But Mr Williamson bleats. Bleats, like an adenoidal goat.

Another thing you might expect of a Defence Secretary is physical presence. Heft. Solidity. Yet Mr Williamson – I keep wanting to type “Master” – is skinny, scrawny, rickety: no meat, just teeth and nostrils. Even his laughter is unimposing: somewhere between a giggle and a gasp.

It’s hard to imagine him as a soldier, unless there were conscription, and even then, we’d have to be pretty close to defeat. (You can picture the despairing General. “Him? Really? Has nobody got any younger brothers? Sisters? Pets?”)

It’s now two months since Mr Williamson’s unexpected appointment. He may need a little longer to convince Tory MPS that he’s the right person for the job. Yesterday in the Commons, Dr Julian Lewis – Tory MP for New Forest East and chairman of the defence select committee – referred to Mr Williamson as “the current Defence Secretary”. Amid guffaws from Labour, Dr Lewis insisted, with the straightest of faces, that he wasn’t trying to be “funny”. But it was hard to see what else the word “current” was doing there.

Dr Lewis wanted “urgent clarification” on possible cuts to the Armed Forces. The Government, he glowered, shouldn’t be cutting spending, but increasing it. The UK was spending “barely” two per cent of GDP on defence; in the mid-nineties it had been three per cent. “Defence is our national insurance policy,” he thundered, “and it’s time for the Treasury to pay the premiums!”

Tory MPS bayed their approval. Mark Francois (Con, Rayleigh & Wickford) urged Mr Williamson to “fend off the pinstriped warriors of the Treasury”.

(As a rule, backbench Tory MPS tend to deplore calls for higher spending by the state, but for the Armed Forces they make an exception.)

Mr Williamson, however, offered them little cause for hope. All he could say was that the Government would be “doing all that we can” to achieve a “sustainable” defence budget. It didn’t sound like the most reassuring promise. When people tell you they’re “doing all we can”, you know to expect the worst.

Diana Johnson (Lab, Kingston upon Hull North) asked whether it was true that Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, had said the Army needed only 50,000 soldiers. Mr Williamson replied with a not entirely rock-solid denial (“There’s an awful lot of speculation, and I’m sure much of it is not based on fact”). He then added, somewhat improbably, that “passion” for the Armed Forces “burns in [Mr Hammond’s] heart”.

Well, they do say that if you love someone, set them free. If soldiers do end up losing their jobs, perhaps that’s how he’ll explain it.