𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Margaret Thatcher made headlines when she was seen at Liam Fox’s 50th birthday celebrations in 2011. This was a rare public outing for the former prime minister and a demonstration of the strength of her bond with now-Sir Liam, whom she had met decades earlier when he was a young Scottish Conservative activist. Today, the 64-year-old former Defence Secretary holds a torch for his late friend and hero’s values – and he fears the nation the Iron Lady led during the Cold War is at risk.

In the last financial year, the Government spent around £109billion on the interest on the national debt – but just £62billion on defence.

“It’s very arguable that our greatest strategic weakness is our indebtedness,” he warns.

He fears that if this is not addressed “we’ll not be able to fund our own security in the way that we ought to”.

Sir Liam’s political convictions were forged in Scotland, where he lived in a council house his parents were able to buy. He believed Labour had put the country through a “socialist nightmare” and saw a clear alternative from the Conservatives.

“My parents always taught us to believe in meritocracy,” he says. “And in my view, meritocracy and socialism are not compatible.”

He studied medicine at Glasgow University and became a champion debater. His conversion to Right-of-centre politics was not unusual. Thatcher attracted “younger people who wanted a break with what was broken Britain,” he remembers.

Now, with Labour once again in power, he believes the Tories need to rediscover that spirit: “Conservatives at that time offered genuine hope and a change in a way that no other party did. It’s a position they need to return to today.”

Sir Liam lost his North Somerset seat to Labour in 2024 by 639 votes, but he is heartened by what he has seen of Kemi Badenoch’s leadership.

“I think she has displayed a steadfastness and intellectual strength and moral courage in all the things that she’s done,” he says. “And she showed that it’s still possible to be consistent as a politician and popular.”

In the mid-1980s, as a young doctor and a prospective Tory candidate, he found himself in Thatcher’s company.

“I was sitting beside her for lunch, and started to have a conversation, which continued right up until her last public appearance, which was at my 50th birthday party,” he says.

He remembers what they talked about – she had just had an operation on her hand for Dupuytren’s contracture, a condition which can leave fingers permanently bent – and the worlds of healthcare and politics have much in common for this former GP.

“If you’re a community GP or an MP, you’re still largely helping people solve their problems,” he remarks.

He also believes “medicine teaches you perspective”. Dealing with true emergencies taught him that an annoying item in a diary column is an “irritation” but not a crisis.

Sir Liam, a leading eurosceptic who also served as International Trade Secretary, is a globetrotter and he is worried by how the UK is now perceived.

“I spend a lot of time out of the country, looking at Britain from the outside, and it saddens me that Britain’s reputation seems to have taken quite a knock internationally.”

His contacts in the United States “can’t understand” why Sir Keir Starmer backed a plan to give the Chagos Islands – home to the UK-US Diego Garcia military base – to Mauritius.

And in the UK, he fears that Britons feel let down by a host of institutions: “They look at the infected blood scandal in the NHS. They look at the prisons letting people out early. “They look at the Post Office scandal. It says to them that a lot of our institutions are serving serving themselves, not the public.”

Meanwhile, Britain’s political class seem intent on chasing poll ratings rather than tackling the nation’s biggest challenges: “The politicians we have today, unlike politicians like Margaret Thatcher, are unwilling to endure unpopularity for any length of time. They see politics as a bit of an episode of X Factor, where you’ve got to be popular.

“And I remember Mrs Thatcher used to say that unpopular policies can lead to popular outcomes, but only if you see them through.”

She also advised: “If it’s popularity you want, my dear, try light entertainment. Politics is the wrong career.”

Sir Liam twice ran for the Conservative leadership and was seen as a leading figure on the Tory Right. But he does not hesitate when asked, if he was starting out today, whether he would back the Tories or Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

“I wouldn’t be drawn to Reform,” he says, adding: “I don’t like them. I find many of them unattractive. I think a lot of the people who’ve gone to Reform did so for the sake of their own careers, more than anything else. I think that they don’t have much hinterland. And I worry that, like a lot of these populist parties, they’re sort of mini-Peronistas – very strong in nationalist rhetoric, but pretty Left-wing on economics.”

Despite the strength of his opinions, he insists he has no desire to return to Parliament, having been in the Commons since 1992.

He now chairs the Abraham Accords Prosperity Group, which helps “young people across the Middle East and North Africa get into business and develop skills that will enable them to produce prosperity”. The hope, he says, is that “by working together and by creating joint ventures between different countries, we can get people to see one another not as representatives of a flag but as human beings, and try to break away from the brutal sterility of where we are today”.

Looking back at his decades in frontline politics, he says: “The single change that I’m most pleased about in my time in politics was Brexit. Sovereignty and constitutional freedom really are worth something.”

He acknowledges that, a decade on from the referendum, Brexit is far from universally popular.

“People may say we’ve not used the freedoms well and now we’re being governed by a bunch of idiots,” he says. “Well, I’ll argue, at least they’re our idiots and we can change them if we want.”

His other great point of pride is securing the passage of the Down Syndrome Act 2022, pioneering legislation to ensure people receive, in particular, the social care they need.

However, he adds: “There’s been a real resistance from parts of the civil service to the legislation which was unanimously passed by both Houses of Parliament. I thought that we’d made a genuine advance, but it seems that the inertia of the bureaucracy is standing in the way of it.”

Sir Liam remains a champion of the UK-US special relationship but strikes a pragmatic tone.

“The special relationship will endure because the special relationship is based upon intelligence and security, and not anything else,” he says. “It’s not a warm, fuzzy thing. People still talk about the special relationship in the sort of Disney-esque hue that it had in the Thatcher-Reagan years. But that was a particular period… It endures because it’s of mutual benefit.”

He points to Ukraine – which agreed to give up its nuclear weapons in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum – as an example of the dangers of disarmament.

He asks: “When you look at Putin today, can you imagine what would have happened geopolitically if Britain had given-in to CND and the one-sided disarmers in the Labour Party, and given up our nuclear weapons?”

Russia, he says, “had a brief chance to become a democracy” but has “become a thugocracy, a criminal state run by gangsters”.

He adds: “There still remains a world out there, a world that Mrs Thatcher once described as being as a perpetual battle between good and evil, right and wrong, democracy and autocracy, freedom and repression. And those battles will go on forever.”