Putin quakes (with laughter) as giggly Gavin socks it to Russia with: ‘Go away... and shut up’
No more Mr Nice Guy. It was time to talk tough. Gavin Williamson puffed out his chest, looked the camera straight in the eye, and let Vladimir Putin know exactly what he thought of him.
“Frankly,” he squeaked, “Russia should go away and shut up!”
Go away and shut up.
That, verbatim, was the official message from Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Defence.
Go away... and shut up.
If the Russians weren’t scared before, they surely are now.
Personally, I was reminded of Churchill’s immortal words from June 1941.
“Hitler is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder,” intoned the great man, in a stirring address to the nation. “And not only that: he smells. Ugh! Yuck! Hitler smells! And he’s a girl! A big smelly girl! Hitler and Mussolini in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”
Mr Williamson was at Rolls-royce, near Bristol, to make his first major speech as Defence Secretary.
Among his audience were a number of uniformed servicemen. Not once, during Mr Williamson’s performance, did they close their eyes, slump forward in their chairs, and groan softly into their hands. There can be no greater tribute to their fortitude.
When Theresa May was forced to replace Sir Michael Fallon, no one expected her to choose Mr Williamson, and four months later the mystery is no closer to being solved.
It’s difficult to imagine someone less obviously suited to a role of such gravity.
Possibly Mr Williamson is aware of this, because here he tried touchingly hard to make up for it. Strenuously he frowned and gripped the sides of his lectern and proudly recited the specifications of the latest military hardware he’d ordered (“The Ajax Shot Detection System, which can sense enemy gunfire and protect troops using our next-generation armoured vehicles!”).
But it made no difference. Desperately though he strains for gravitas (“We have arrived at a profound moment in our history!”), Mr Williamson is afflicted by an incurable air of unseriousness.
The giggly grin; the weedy voice; the pipe-cleaner frame; the shinyfaced boyishness... he just doesn’t look like a Defence Secretary.
He looks like a candidate on The Apprentice, fired in week three after trying to flog a crate of halibut to a floor of bemused accountants.
A journalist asked him whether we were entering a new Cold War, and why he was vaccinating troops against anthrax.
Mr Williamson answered the second part of the question, and then forgot what the first part was.
“Cold War,” prompted the journalist. “Cold War!” chirped Mr Williamson. “Well ... let’s face it ... relations ain’t good, are they?”
He said this so blithely, he might have been talking about the rivalry between two village football teams.
After a brief period of wittering he decided that, if not yet “cold”, the geopolitical situation was at any rate “exceptionally, exceptionally chilly”. God love him.
A boy, playing at soldiers.
‘The giggly grin; the weedy voice; the pipe-cleaner frame ... he just doesn’t look like a Defence Secretary’