James Forsyth James Forsyth

Michael Fallon: parliament needs the ‘courage’ to vote for war

An interview with the new, hawkish Defence Secretary

The Ministry of Defence is like a sauna on Sunday. The air circulation system has been switched off and the place is hot — and deserted. Yet when you reach the Secretary of State’s floor, a small team is hard at work. As you enter Michael Fallon’s office, you see why. On an easel sits a map of Iraq and Syria. Tellingly, though, this isn’t the only map on the stand. Sitting behind it are ones of Pakistan, the Central African Republic and Sierra Leone. It emerges later that the one of Ukraine has gone missing.

Fallon is 62, but he has the energy of a man half his age. Our conversation is punctuated with regular requests from him to his staff to bring him a map, a copy of the Nato charter or some other piece of paper. Having finally joined the cabinet 21 years after he entered Parliament, he is determined to make full use of this late flowering of his political career.

Unlike many modern politicians, Fallon doesn’t speak in some Westminster code but plain English. He warns that Islamic State is ‘a clear and present danger to us… and we have to do something about it’.

He doesn’t accept that this is ‘some side effect of the previous intervention’, dismissing the whole idea that this is blowback from the Iraq war with a wave of the hand. He has little time too for the idea that Britain should stay out of the fight. He seems morally offended at the suggestion that we should leave it to other countries to deal with Islamic State, and irritated at the failure of some to grasp that the struggle against Islamist extremism is ‘Britain’s business’. ‘We’ve had attacks on the streets of London, on our transport system, at Glasgow airport, the murder of Lee Rigby — how much more evidence do you need that this is a very clear and dangerous threat to our way of life and to all the democracies of the West? This is a new battle of Britain.’

But Fallon accepts that there will have to be a vote and debate in Parliament before Britain joins this fight.

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