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.’
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