Liam Fox: "We have inherited a historic mess."

By Paul Goodman and Mark Fox.

The Ministry of Defence is a frantic place.  We are marched into a waiting room.  As we linger, the door is flung open, and a bearded figure with a nautical air, bearing a faint resemblance to Lord Alloa in the 39 Steps, gazes in and clocks us.  "No," he barks, and slams the door shut.  It opens again, and we are rescued by Hayden Allen, Liam Fox's toiling Special Adviser.  As he walks us out towards the Defence Secretary's Office, we half-wonder whether the right course is to salute any passing staff, or whether they are mistakenly about to salute us.

Fox, too, is pressed for time.  Prime Minister's Questions will begin in forty-five minutes flat, and he has a meeting to squeeze in between now and then.  We will therefore cram in as much as we can.  And there is as much to ask the Defence Secretary as any other Cabinet Minister, perhaps more.  In little over a year, his tenure has seen the first strategic defence review since 1997, the start of a spending scaleback unprecedented in modern times, a new military front open up in Libya, and David Cameron's announcement that our combat troops will leave Afghanistan by the end of 2015.