Follow the money: Fox is not off the hook yet

WELL, at least Janet Daley loves him. The Daily Telegraph's scourge of the Left jumped to the defence of Liam Fox yesterday, accusing Labour of being overblown in their attempt to claim the scalp of her favourite right-wing Cabinet minister.

Daley says David Cameron will be genuinely pleased that Fox has survived so far because he needs him. "Mr Fox is one of the few non-public school, traditional right-of-centre Tories in Mr Cameron's team," says Daley. "He is too valuable to lose."

Margaret Thatcher - Fox's pin-up girl - would agree. But Daley and Lady T may be giving Fox the kiss of death. The truth is, the affair stinks to high heaven and it will take more than a brisk flit with the air freshener to make the stench go away.

Cameron knows it, too. How quickly yesterday morning's message from No 10 – "the Prime Minister is very supportive of Liam Fox and does not want to lose him" - was replaced by the rather more sanguine statement: "It is clear, as Liam Fox himself said, that serious mistakes were made in allowing the distinction between professional responsibilities and personal loyalties to be blurred – and this has clearly raised concerns about impropriety and potential conflicts of interest."

Despite Cameron's early efforts to throw a blanket over the affair, Fox was NOT cleared in the investigation by Ursula Brennan, the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence, and her inquiry is still ongoing. She found Werritty had had 22 meetings - not 14 as previously claimed -  with Fox inside the MoD, even though he was not security-cleared. Most of the meetings were in the MoD coffee bar.

Brennan also discovered that Werritty had been given Fox's diary dates by civil servants at Fox's behest. Brennan said they had been ordered not to do that again.

"Although there is still further material to be checked," said Brennan, "I am already clear that there are areas where the current guidance on propriety and the management of Ministerial Private Offices needs to be strengthened."

That is hardly the clean bill of health the ladies of the right had wished for. And there is worse to come.

The parliamentary commissioner for standards could launch an investigation into the beleaguered Defence Secretary after it was claimed he allowed Adam Werritty to live in his London flat, for which Fox was taking taxpayers' money to fund the mortgage.

Labour MP John Mann last night formally asked the commissioner to investigate. If he agrees - and it will be difficult for him to turn it down - it would be a third probe into Fox.

Potentially more serious for Fox is the news that Sir Gus O'Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, is now carrying out his own full inquiry into Fox's links with Werritty and whether, as The Guardian puts it today, Werritty "was profiting from the privileged access Fox gave him to his thinking and his ministerial diary".

When they were investigating Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein were told to follow the money. Gus O'Donnell has to ask the question - how has Adam Werritty earned a living? How did he pay for those 18 trips abroad since May last year when we know he either accompanied Fox to such far-flung outposts as Singapore, Abu Dhabi and Tampa, or happened to bump into him in when Fox arrived in town?

So far we know Werritty has received a small payment of just over £5,000 as an intern from Fox and a modest fee from the Atlantic Bridge charity that has folded following the Charity Commission report criticising it for failing to act like a charity.

But if it is found that Werritty was making large sums of money because of his special access to the Defence Secretary, it should be curtains for Fox, regardless of how much his right-wing coven want him to survive. ·