Sir Gavin Williamson’s WhatsApp hissy fit with Liz Truss’s chief whip Wendy Morton for excluding him from the Queen’s funeral is borne of a deep-seated sense of resentment that the ex-fireplace salesman has never been accorded the status he feels is his due.
One old Whitehall hand tells me Williamson has been in a strop ever since Theresa May, when she was prime minister, sacked him as defence secretary after a leak from the National Security Council about the Chinese telecom giant Huawei’s potential involvement in the British 5G network.
Williamson denied he’d done anything wrong and was later caught allegedly plotting May’s downfall with his long-term friend James Wharton in a Westminster restaurant.
After this, Williamson lobbied hard for Wharton to be elevated to the peerage and this Boris Johnson consented to in 2020. Although Williamson remains extremely close to Wharton – a former lobbyist, one-time campaign manager to Johnson and lately embroiled in a cronyism row after being appointed head of the Office for Students – it irks him that his chum has ended up with a seat in the Lords while he only got a knighthood.
“As weird as it may sound, there was a point when Gavin genuinely saw himself as prime ministerial material, so everything that has happened since has been a source of great annoyance to him,” says my informant. “His best mate getting a peerage when he got a knighthood has been a cause of a lot of gnashing of teeth.”
Incidentally, among the directorships Wharton lists in the Lords’ register of members interests is GBMW Ltd, whose current clients include Aquind Ltd. That’s the company run by the Tory party donor Alexander Temerko that is bidding to lay a £1.2bn high-voltage power cable between France and Portsmouth but is being opposed by environmentalists.
