There’s a been a feeling all week that no sooner than anyone writes anything about Liam Fox, he might have resigned. Yet as far as I know, the defence secretary is still in post. The question is why? On Wednesday, Ed Miliband told David Cameron that he was more interested in saving the job of one cabinet colleague than hundreds of thousands of others across the UK. Why is Cameron so keen to cling to Fox?

Cameron was a special adviser during the most turbulent period of the Conservative party’s history. As special adviser to Norman Lamont, and then Michael Howard, Cameron suffered first-hand the death agonies of the Tory government. He was in the conference hall in Blackpool in 1993 when prime minister John Major announced that the Tories would be getting ‘back to basics’. It was meant to mean a return to core Conservative policies, but was interpreted some kind of moral rearmament. Major actually said the basics were ‘sound money, free trade, traditional teaching, respect for the family and the law.’ He didn’t say ‘no extra-marital how’s-your-father, no auto-asphixiation, no hookers’, and given his recent record with Edwina Currie, he was never going to.

Back to basics gave a green light to every journalist to go through the bins of every cabinet minister. Any indiscretion was wrapped into an ongoing narrative which ran something like this: look, the government says we should be moral, but here are Tory MPs and ministers taking bribes, cheating on their wives and lying in court. Between 1993 and 1997, Tim Yeo fathered a ‘love child’, the Earl of Caithness’s wife shot herself after her husband’s affair was revealed, Neil Hamilton was alleged to have taken cash for asking parliamentary questions, Jonathan Aitken was alleged to have procured prostitutes for his business partners, Hartley Booth was revealed as a sex pest, Piers Merchant was caught kissing a teenager, and Stephen Milligan was found dead after a solitary sex game in his Hammersmith flat went tragically wrong.

The best insider account of this turbulent comes from an unlikely source: Gyles Brandreth. As a Conservative whip in this period, Brandreth, like Cameron, watched each horrible twist and turn from the inside. He later published his diary Unlocking the Code. A typical entry (26 July 1993) reads: ‘I don’t see how the prime minister can struggle on for four more years like this – lurching from shambles to disaster to catastrophe. If it weren’t so heartbreaking it would be very funny.’ Note the date: before the bulk of the scandals had even been exposed.

We are all prisoners of our experiences, David Cameron no less than the rest of us. To have gone through those few years as a spad at the Treasury and Home Office, to have seen the carnage of wrecked careers and death-by-headline, must have seared into Cameron the desire to not go through it again. He knows full well that once ministers start resigning, it is a process that accelerates. For Fox to resign over his alleged breaches of the ministerial code would not end the matter; it would merely open every minister up to laser-like scrutiny from the press. That explains why Cameron is clinging so tenaciously to his defence secretary.

There’s another reason too. The office of prime minister brings a status manifested by motorcades, international travel, press conferences with presidents and photos with generals. It is easy to forget how weak David Cameron’s position really is. The Conservative party hasn’t won a general election since 1992. Cameron failed to make a breakthrough against a Labour government which by the end had all the appeal of athlete’s foot. He owes his position to another party, which for reasons which historians will analyse for decades to come, has decided to commit suicide in exchange for five years in office. Cameron’s government is an edifice with all the durability of the marbles in KerPlunk. Because Fox represents the rightwing of the Conservative party, with a range of interests and alliances across the spectrum of rightwingery from being anti-abortion to his links to the US Republicans, he is pretty well bomb-proof. Cameron doesn’t want to look like he is ditching the right’s standard bearer for fear of their revenge. It was a problem that, for example, Tony Blair did not have in telling Peter Mandelson he had to go after the Hinduja affair.

That’s not to say he won’t go, of course. The evidence mounts of silly and unnecessary beaches of the rules governing fundraising, access to ministerial resources, and so on. More evidence and information will emerge, as it has today, of who paid, who benefited and what was said at the many foreign trips conducted with Adam Werritty. Even Oliver Letwin stuffing London parks’ bins with Cabinet Office documents won’t distract Fleet Street for long. They want Dr Fox’s head on a platter, and they usually get what they want.

Is he still there?

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Paul Richards is a former special adviser and writes a weekly column for Progress, Paul’s week in politics

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Photo: Defence Images