Theresa May sacked Gavin Williamson as defence secretary not only because she believed he had leaked sensitive security intelligence to The Daily Telegraph but also because he had apparently spread rumours about the Prime Minister’s health.
Williamson “was allegedly heard saying earlier this year that her Type 1 diabetes meant she was unable to discharge her responsibilities as Prime Minister,” the Mail reported on Sunday.
It recalled: “When Mrs May revealed in 2011 that she had diabetes, which carries the risk of heart attacks and strokes, she said: ‘The diabetes doesn’t affect how I do the job or what I do. It’s a case of head down and getting on with it.’
“She is often seen wearing a diabetes monitoring patch, which helps sufferers keep track of their sugar levels without having to resort to fingerprick tests.”
One of Mrs May’s allies said: “It’s absolutely outrageous he would attempt to use the Prime Minister’s health condition against her and to suggest it makes her too frail and ill to be the Prime Minister.”
According to the Mail, it was also revealed that “Williamson had scrawled ‘f*** the Prime Minister’ across an official memo in February after Mrs May overruled his decision to deploy the UK’s new aircraft carrier to the South China Sea”.
Whatever the truth of these allegations, there is now a total breakdown of relations between May and Williamson, who was her campaign manager when she put herself forward to be party leader when David Cameron stood down in 2016. May rewarded him by making him Tory chief whip in the Commons and then defence secretary when he was barely 40.
May justified his dismissal when she told ITV News: “I did take a difficult decision. This was not about what was leaked; it was about where it was leaked from. It was the importance of the question of trust around that National Security Council table.”
Asked if she was convinced Williamson was responsible for the leak, May said: “I took the decision that I did. That was the right decision.”
Now robbed of the chance to succeed May as Prime Minister, Williamson, who is said to know “where the bodies are buried”, is said to be planning a Commons speech to bring down his former boss — rather in the manner Geoffrey Howe put paid to Margaret Thatcher in 1990 with a devastating resignation speech.
As he quit as leader of the Commons, Howe’s words about the way he had been undermined by Thatcher have gone down in British political history: “It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.”
Williamson told the Sunday Express he was not the one who had leaked the deliberations of the National Security Council, when May had given the green light to the involvement of the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei in building Britain’s 5G network.
“It is pretty painful when you’re getting hanged for something you didn’t do,” he said.
He had confirmed an 11-minute phone conversation with the Daily Telegraph journalist who wrote the story but insisted Huawei was not discussed. “This whole affair hasn’t been about trying to find the real culprit who leaked what was said at that meeting. It has been a game of politics, it’s been about settling scores and trying to prove the Prime Minister’s political strength.
“Whatever this report is, it’s slipshod and slapdash. And a full and impartial investigation needs to be conducted on this shabby and discredited witch-hunt that has been so badly mishandled by both the Prime Minister and (the cabinet secretary) Mark Sedwill.”
Political editor Nicholas Watt warned on BBC Newsnight: “Make no mistake, Gavin Williamson is on the war path.”
The BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg commented: “In the coming weeks and months he could prove a rather devastating enemy of Theresa May from the back benches.”
May’s former adviser, Joey Jones, said: “He is a dangerous person not to have on side. Gavin Williamson has been around the entrails of politics right at the heart of it for a long time.”
