𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Sir Gavin Williamson was notorious for keeping a Mexican red-kneed tarantula named Cronus in his office when he was Conservative Chief Whip. The hairy spider passed away this year and his present companion could not be more different. A highly affectionate “working cocker” spaniel named Lottie now accompanies him to Parliament and she clearly adores her owner.

I have never before conducted an interview while being repeatedly licked but Lottie is ablaze with a friendly delight in life rarely encountered in Westminster. Right now, the former Defence Secretary’s thoughts are focused on something far more frightening than a giant spider. He is worried about the threat posed by Russia to a United Kingdom he believes urgently needs to rearm.

“We’re not in a Cold War,” he warns. “We’re one step up above that.”

Britain is a “much greater” target than other European states, he argues, because this country is a “warrior nation” which has repeatedly proven its readiness to confront aggressors.

“Russia sees Britain differently to how they see France or Germany,” he says. “They see Britain as a greater threat because they know Britain will lead from the front – Britain isn’t nervous about standing on its own in order to be able to do what is right. Let us not forget, in World War 2, Britain was the only country that went to war to defend the rights of others. Every other country went to war because they had been attacked themselves.”

Britain, he warns, has not woken up to the scale of the threat before us. He argues Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership was defined by “a naivety about politics and a naivety about the intentions of others”.

He explains: “What scares me is – and some of us have been making an argument for quite a long time – the threat level is rising so quickly, and still in Britain, prime ministers are not willing to face up to the really difficult and tough choices that need to be made.”

Sir Gavin argues that the level of defence investment talked about today won’t “even scratch the surface” and the nation needs to go much further in developing resilience against attack while expanding the size of the armed forces. In April there were just 74,370 members of the regular army.

“We’ve got to get back up to a point where we have 100,000 men in our army again,” he says, as well as pressing for an “enormous expansion” of the reserves.

Sir Gavin sees both challenges and opportunities when it comes national rearmament. In World War 2, he points out, Britain was home to factories which switched to manufacturing planes, tanks and artillery as part of the war effort; now, he laments, we have “lost so much of that infrastructure”. Reindustrialisation, he argues, is both “vital for our resilience” and an opportunity to grow the economy.

He enthuses: “We still have the skills to produce the very best things in the world… We’ve got the ability to do it, but actually, with the right imagination, with the right investment, the Government could turn us into a defence superpower.”

France, he states, has “always been very good” at “backing French industry first”. A key challenge is winning Treasury support for investment.

“The Express regularly covered my spats with the Treasury,” he says. “The danger with the Treasury is it understands the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Warning that Russian president Vladimir Putin is watching the UK, he states: “When he sees that Britain isn’t rearming at the rate that they need to do, he will take that as a sign of weakness. And that is why the new prime minister, if he [keeps] this lily-livered defence investment plan and lets that be the last word, [will] be letting down Britain.”

He remembers the anger he felt in 2018 at the Salisbury poisonings, when Russia attempted to assassinate a former military officer who defected.

“The brazenness, the recklessness, was unbelievable,” he says. “And this was a pattern of behaviour. This wasn’t a one-off.”

The then-Defence Secretary considered Britain’s response “timid”, as if the country was still operating in a “gentleman’s era” of UK-Russia relations.

Today he is concerned that Russia has “a far higher risk appetite” than the Soviet Union “even in the Cold War”.

He is appalled at Labour’s attempts to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius as part of a multi-billion pound deal which would see Britain pay to lease back the US-UK Diego Garcia military base.

Such a deal – coming at a time of concern about the expansion of Chinese influence in the region – seems wrongheaded to the MP.

He says: “We have the greatest aircraft carrier in the world permanently stationed in the Indian Ocean. It’s called Diego Garcia – it is an unsinkable aircraft carrier.”

China, he warns, will “look at every opportunity” to “diminish Britain’s influence”. And he takes a grim view of recent dealings with Beijing.

“Let’s face it,” he says. “Every time we’ve done a deal with China, Britain has ended up poorer and China has ended up richer.”

At the age of just 50, Sir Gavin is a Tory grandee, having held a string of offices including Education Secretary. Scarborough-born and comprehensive school-educated, he worked as a manager for a fireplace manufacturer and a pottery and china maker before winning election for South Staffordshire in 2010.

He was marked out as an MP on the up when David Cameron picked him as his parliamentary private secretary – the so-called “eyes and ears” of the PM – in 2013.

“David was an absolutely brilliant individual to work with,” he says.

Looking back, he does not see any way that the then-PM could have stayed in post after the 2016 referendum because “he’d been so strident in the arguments that he had made” against quitting the EU.

If he was a young man today, would he join the Conservatives or Reform UK? He doesn’t hesitate: “Oh, Conservatives!”

At the core of his party, he insists, is the mission to be the “champion” of men and women who start a business and then take on staff.

He admits this may have been “slightly dulled” but insists that under Kemi Badenoch it is “coming back”.

The way to bring voters home from parties as diverse as Reform, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, he believes, is to act as the “world’s best opposition”, set out a plan and “continuously oppose this awful government”.

Sir Gavin is unimpressed by the latest resident of Number 10, commenting that “being prime minister isn’t just about wearing a t-shirt and a bomber jacket”.

“He doesn’t want to take the tough decisions,” he says. “And I think Kemi will be going in there hard and attacking him for it.”

If he longs to be a shadow cabinet member, he hides it well, saying: “I’m delighted just to play my part as a happy backbench Member of Parliament… I don’t sit around hankering for phone calls. I’m there to charge at the enemy, battle away, do my bit for my constituents, but also, hopefully make some of the arguments that need to be made for what’s right.”

He may not be on the front row of politics but he still looms large in the political imagination. The Spectator recently quoted a Reform UK source saying Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain is a “Tory put-up job, expertly organised by Gavin Williamson”.

This amuses Sir Gavin. “They seem to have a lot of conspiracy theories about me,” he says. “I mean, I just wish I was as interesting as people sometimes credit me with being.”