Adam Werritty last night pressed his prettiest panties and packed them tightly into the suitcase which has lain dormant for the best part of five years. It is not that Werritty hasn’t travelled abroad in all that time, but rather that this suitcase is a special suitcase, full to the brim with old documents pertaining to the defunct fake charity the Atlantic Bridge, and business cards declaring him the special friend and adviser of disgraced former Defence Secretary Liam Fox.
Much of the attention around Theresa May’s first Cabinet has gone to Boris Johnson, the former London mayor and face of the campaign to leave the EU who has now been appointed to the post of Foreign Secretary. May was expected to bring more women into the cabinet, and so far has provided one, while the supposed balance of her selections is undermined by the presence of three leading Leave campaigners in key foreign-facing roles, including David Davis as the preposterously-named Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union.
But it is Liam Fox’s appointment to another new position, that of Secretary of State for International Trade, which is most telling. Because as May surely knows, Fox comes as part of a package deal.
With Fox you don’t only get the wealth of connections which he forged thanks to the Atlantic Bridge, a scheme he set up in 1997 to bring together right-minded figures from the United Kingdom and the United States. The interests of those involved with the Atlantic Bridge – which was funded by organisations like the American Legislative Exchange Council, effectively a corporate lobby group which counts Big Oil, Big Tobacco, the National Rifle Association, and climate change deniers as its clients – included routine right-wing fare around small government and market liberalisation, but most of all they were concerned with upholding a shared military-industrial complex.
Fox comes with two men in particular: Adam Werritty, ostensibly the UK executive director of the Atlantic Bridge, who thanks to Fox received unauthorised access to the Ministry of Defence over 22 visits, and on 40 occasions joined his close personal business partner on official government engagements, before the brazen immorality of pushing paid-for defence interests on the margins of formal talks caused Fox to lose his position; and Matthew Gould, the British Ambassador to Israel until last year, who was involved with Fox and Werritty in shady discussions around an attack on Iran in the Israeli interest.
In Theresa May’s new cabinet, Werritty will become Secretary of State for Sordid Affairs in Sri Lanka, while Gould attains the more coveted position of Secretary of State for Screwing Things Up in the Middle East. May is reportedly still seeking the right candidate to fulfill one of her old job responsibilities, that of signing secret security pacts with Saudi Arabia.
