Things got a little heated in the House of Commons last night after defence secretary Ben Wallace gave short shrift to fellow Tory MP and ex Royal Anglian Regiment reservist Lieutenant Mark Francois.
All hell broke loose after a war of words over the Ministry of Defence (MoD) budget blackhole. Scot’s Guard’s own Captain Wallace pointed out that criticism lobbed from the backbenches about defence procurement would carry a little more weight if the honourable critics had themselves not been former defence ministers overseeing the deficit of which they complained.
Lieutenant Francois was particularly aggrieved, demanding corrections to the record and apologies galore. Those Stakhanovite scribes of Hansard have diplomatically recorded the exchange here, with Francois, who served as a minister of state in the MoD 2012-15, telling Wallace: ‘I was not in the department – you don’t know what you’re talking about.’
It prompted long-suffering deputy speaker Rosie Winterton to weigh in: ‘I think yelling at each other is really not a good look. I think the secretary of state has come to the end of his answer.’ After bickering with his colleague proved ultimately fruitless, the pint-sized warrior upped and left long before the end of the debate.
However, Mr S hears that this wasn’t the end of the matter. On the way out witnesses say he continued to vent his fury at the MoD bods watching the debate from the officials box to the right of the Speaker’s chair in front of Commons clerks. Little did he know that the pinstriped apparatchik receiving the brunt of Francois’s ‘squaring up’ was himself a reservist – with the Special Forces.
‘Action Man looked like he was going to laugh in the little fella’s face rather than deck him,’ says my mole. Mr S for one is glad to see that integration runs deep in the MoD’s culture!
Comments