Can the unity built between the Camden People’s Alliance and the Green Party make an electoral breakthrough on the PM’s home territory this week? ANDREW MURRAY talks to some of those involved
GAVIN WILLIAMSON was chief whip, responsible for discipline, in the most fractious and disunited parliamentary Tory Party in living memory. He helped Theresa May become prime minister and called in the debt to be appointed defence secretary. Williamson then set about proving his inadequacy for the job with such a catalogue of maladroit gaffes and juvenile utterances as to evoke disbelief and hilarity among the military types nominally junior to him in rank and status.
Of course, Britain’s military and security establishment more or less runs itself conscious that ministers come and go while the defence of the imperial realm traditionally depends on the permanent caste of professionals to which they belong by birth or preference.
Where the arriviste Williamson came unstuck was in not taking account of the new importance the security apparatus enjoys.
Washington’s response to a downed jet shows a superpower still reaching for overwhelming force even as its wars repeatedly fail, says NICK WRIGHT
Outrage greeted Donald Trump’s suggestion earlier this year that Britain stayed off the front lines. But evidence suggests our forces were at times pulled from the most dangerous fighting — not by military failure, but by pressure at home, says IAN SINCLAIR
Starmer sabotaged Labour with his second referendum campaign, mobilising a liberal backlash that sincerely felt progressive ideals were at stake — but the EU was then and is now an entity Britain should have nothing to do with, explains NICK WRIGHT



