A civil service mole has promised me some insider news about Gus O’Donnell’s planned whitewash of Fox relating to how they will treat Werritty’s finances in the investigation. This entry is being posted 45 minutes after I leave home to meet them, by an unorthodox route and method of transport, to an improbable location. Oh, and neither of us is carrying a mobile phone either. So don’t bother, you’re stuffed.

I remember the gay-baiting student Liam Fox as active in the banning of a Gay Society at Glasgow University Union in the early 1980’s. As President of Dundee University Students Association, which at the time had close ties with our Glasgow counterparts in the Scottish campaign against the NUS, I tried to change their mind, and that was my first memory of the odious little bigot.

Being sick in bed this weekend and paying little attention to the news, I had presumed that Fox’s “ex-flatmate” Adam Werritty was of his own age, a flatmate from students days or impecunious early employment. I also presumed that Werritty had been Fox’s best man back in a similar period. I am surprised to find that the 40 year old Fox picked up the 24 year old Werritty at a meeting in Edinburgh Unversity only ten years ago, shortly after that Werritty moved into his flat, and after they had known each other just four years, Werrity was apparently Liam’s closest buddy on earth and became his best man.

Fox accommodated Werritty in taxpayer funded accommodation and around the best man period was funding him on his MPs expenses – before the “Atlantic Bridge” fake charity wheeze. Fox was found by the expenses scandal investigation to have “overclaimed” over £20,000 in mortgage payments and was forced to pay it back. It is unclear why Fox was not prosecuted. He also charged mobile phone bills of over £17,000 to the taxpayer. There must now be an investigation of how many of those calls were to Adam Werritty.

The fact that when Liam Fox was shadow health secretary, Werritty ran a health consultancy, and when Fox became defence secretary, Werritty became a defence consultant, tells you all that you need to know about this relationship. Tory attempts to fog the big picture by focusing on what exactly was discussed at individual meetings are irrelevant. I commend this Telegraph article by James Kirkup, who deserves a prize for best use of the phrase “by coincidence”.