Gavin Williamson has been a Conservative MP since 2010, for South Staffordshire and now Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge, and his career is a study in how far organisational cunning can carry a politician who is good at acquiring power and disastrous at using it.

The skill is real and worth stating. Williamson came up through the fireplace and pottery trades in Staffordshire, not the usual route, and made his name as the whip who ran Theresa May's victorious leadership campaign in 2016. He understands the mechanics of Westminster, the favours and the threats, better than almost anyone, and it took him from chief whip to the cabinet inside two years. In 2024 he held his redrawn seat when bigger names fell.

After that the record is a sequence of disasters, each ended by a sacking or a resignation. As Defence Secretary he was dismissed by Theresa May in 2019 after she concluded he was responsible for leaking discussions from the National Security Council about Huawei, a charge he denied while swearing on his children's lives. As Education Secretary he presided over the 2020 exams fiasco, when an algorithm downgraded the results of forty per cent of A level students, hitting the poorest hardest, before he was forced into a humiliating reversal to teacher grades. He was removed from that job the following year. Recalled to the cabinet by Rishi Sunak in October 2022, he lasted barely a fortnight before resigning over a stream of abusive messages he had sent to the then chief whip, Wendy Morton, telling her there was a price for everything. Parliament's standards panel later found he had bullied her and that his conduct was an abuse of power.

Between the Defence and Education jobs he had told Russia, after the Salisbury poisoning, that it should go away and shut up, a line that summed up a tendency to mistake belligerence for strategy.

For all this he was knighted in 2022, on Boris Johnson's recommendation, a reward that the teachers and civil servants on the wrong end of his record found hard to comprehend.

Williamson is a gifted operator and a genuine self made man, and the talent for the dark arts of politics is not nothing in a trade that runs on them. He is also the clearest case in modern politics of failing upward, a minister handed three of the most important jobs in government and removed in disgrace from each, who emerged with a knighthood and a safe seat while the people his departments were meant to serve emerged with worse. The ability to win power was never his problem. What he did once he had it was.