shouting and fierce scuffles. “It’s just like
the cabinet,” Wallace remarks.
In the week we meet Truss has been to
visit British troops in Estonia and got
herself pictured atop a tank, a breathtaking
simulacrum of one of the most famous
images of Margaret Thatcher. Wallace was
only too pleased. “I’ve had cabinet colleagues
who wouldn’t let people do things — ‘Oh,
you can’t go there and you can’t visit this
and you can’t speak to someone’ — and it is
just bollocks. I’m delighted that Liz Truss
wants to showcase the army and our work
in Estonia. And if the secretary of state for
transport wants to go in my aeroplane, well,
the Queen’s aeroplane, I’d be delighted.”
Part of his admiration for Truss might
be the consequence of the falling-out
Wallace had with her predecessor as foreign
secretary, Dominic Raab, who stayed on
holiday as Kabul fell to the Taliban. A civil
service whistleblower later claimed Raab
delayed decisions on returnees because he
wanted the spreadsheet formatted
differently. Wallace was also unimpressed
with the circus surrounding Pen Farthing,
the former soldier who demanded the right
to evacuate his staff and 170 pet dogs and
cats from Kabul. Downing Street persists in
claiming that Boris Johnson and his wife,Carrie, did not intervene on Farthing’s
behalf, despite the existence of a letter from
Johnson’s parliamentary aide Trudy
Harrison suggesting otherwise.
The defence secretary did little to hide
his disdain for diplomats who fled the scene
while the armed forces held the fort. “The
Foreign Office needs a cutting edge,” he
says pointedly. “There was a lot of denial
about Afghanistan. Parts of the diplomatic
corps thought it was all going to go
swimmingly well and I just said, ‘Look, the
game is up and we need to start moving.’ ”Wallace has not softened his view that
the Americans have made a big error by
leaving so fast, allowing China and Russia
to exploit deals with the Taliban. “They [the
US] had a perfectly legitimate right to decide
they’d had enough, they had lost lots of men
and women in Afghanistan, but I think it was
strategically wrong because the world is
more interconnected than it has ever been
and it was no surprise to see China go almost
immediately into Afghanistan.”
When he was security minister, Wallace
used to give me an interview in the new
year warning about the dangers ahead
— cyberwar, chemical weapons (just
months before the Russian novichok attack
in Salisbury against the Skripals). What,
I ask, is keeping him awake at night these
days? The answer is not what I expected.
“I worry that America withdraws and
the world splinters,” he says. “Nato
doesn’t function as well as it could do, the
European Union can’t come to a common
view. Our strength comes from our
alliances, and if our alliances don’t work
we’re all weak. America does need to be
the world policeman, for us, for our
values, for our way of life. I worry what
happens if America were to become
TOM BARNES FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE isolationist in this global world.” n
Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, visits British
troops in Estonia last month, evoking a
famous 1986 image of Margaret ThatcherThere is lots of shouting and fierce scuffles as 2 Para carries
out a mock raid. “It’s just like the cabinet,” Wallace remarks