Liam Fox: A Wet Cardboard Box Full Of Bricks

LIAM FOX has tried to end speculation over which male friend was staying with him the night his flat was burgled.
"For the sake of clarity," he says, "it wasn't Adam Werritty."
So that's the Defence Secretary's idea of clarity? Naming one out of seven billion members of the human race who WASN'T sleeping over on the night in question, rather than the one who WAS?
God help us if he ever decides to be vague.
Though at least he's only in denial. His party are just plain old lying toerags, because even after Fox told police there was someone with him during the break-in, they claimed he'd been alone.
So, how can we trust a Government machinery with this much disregard for basic honesty?
How can we believe anything they tell us on issues that really matter if they're prepared to fib over something so nothing-y?
Because that's what this is — a big, fat nothing.
Forget all the stuff about Fox helping this Werritty guy make business contacts by taking him round the world as an unofficial, unpaid adviser. What this story is really about is and what all the posh-paper pundits are skirting round the edges of is whether or not the guy's gay.
Now, let's make one thing clear at this point. Neither do I have a clue whether he is gay or not — nor am I accusing him.
It's just that everything you ever hear or read about his private life's so heavily-laden with innuendo it sags like a wet cardboard box full of bricks. As far back as 2005, Westminster bitching forced him to claim that getting engaged "should put an end to all the gossip".
Not the way your average bloke sums up his decision to get married, but there you go. But who cares what his sexuality is? What difference would it make to his political abilities?
For me, it would make absolutely none — he'd still be the same dislikable, shifty Tory suit he's always been. But the point is, I wouldn't think any less of him if it turned out he liked sleeping with men.
What WOULD be be a problem is if he was gay and had covered it up for the sake of his career.
Because, as with his party, you'd have to ask what ELSE he'd be willing to cover up to give himself an easier life.
In fact, I'll say just two words to Dr Fox as he considers his next move.
Tommy Sheridan.
If when the Scottish Socialist maverick was confronted about whether he'd been up to naughties at sex clubs he'd had the courage to say yes, to look his accusers in the eye and tell them to grow up, to shrug that everyone had consented and no one had got hurt, the whole scandal would have been a two-minute wonder.
Instead, he lied. And ended up in jail.
Political history is littered with stories like his.
Tales of ambitious men with necks of brass and feet of clay, ladder-climbers with the power to get what they want from life but without enough sense of responsibility to own up to it.
Let's pick another one out of the hat from the recent past, the late Tory MP Piers Merchant, who denied an affair with a nightclub hostess despite being photographed with her in this paper.
Party spin doctors looked him in the eye and asked for the truth. He swore he'd been set up, only to be forced to resign when it turned out he WAS seeing her — yet even then, he claimed the relationship had only begun AFTER the original picture was taken.
That's how it works in these circles — deny, deny, deny and keep on denying, blur the line between reality and fantasy until even a lie detector would hang itself from the chandeliers.
They think they're being clever. They think they're outsmarting us clueless oiks. But the truth is, all they ever do is buy themselves time until someone, somewhere eventually outs them for whatever it is they've done.
And the stupid thing is that what they've done is usually nothing to be ashamed of.
If Liam Fox turns out to be gay, that's his business and his alone.
The only thing that makes any of it everyone else's business is when a minister of the Crown holds Parliament and the electorate in such low regard that he thinks he can bull his way through a fiasco that could be put to bed in two minutes flat with some simple truths.
Quite an irony, isn't it?
The Tories were the ones who didn't want fox hunting banned.
Yet unless they pull their finger out, this one's going to be torn to shreds by the hounds any day now.

Bill Leckie in the Scottish Sun.
Hilarious!