Quentin Letts: Only fools underestimate Gavin Williamson 

Our new Defence Secretary cuts a slim and boyish figure, leading some colleagues to give him the sneering nickname ‘Private Pike’.

Like the drippy young character from TV’s Dad’s Army, Gavin Williamson does not initially inspire much fear or confidence.

Yet as would-be Islamist terrorists – and the Chancellor of the Exchequer – discovered this week, it’s unwise to underestimate Mr Williamson.

Young ‘Pike’ is proving to be rather more combative than expected.

In yesterday’s Mail he made bracingly plain his politically incorrect thoughts about British citizens who go abroad to fight for Islamic State.

He would prefer them to be killed than readmitted to our country, comments at odds with years of hand-wringing from Establishment human-rights types.

Meanwhile, Philip Hammond has been left nursing a few bruises after Mr Williamson told the RAF to refuse to fly him round the world until he settled an overdue departmental bill for official flights. The Treasury responded by letting slip the ‘Pike’ nickname, but Mr Williamson is showing them he’ll be less of a spending-cuts patsy than Mr Hammond when he was Defence Secretary.

At 41, Mr Williamson is the youngest person ever to be put in charge of our modern Armed Forces. But as one backbench Conservative MP puts it: ‘Gavin may look like a teenager but he knows how to carve a joint of meat. Behind his jovial exterior there’s a tough, dispassionate character.’

Gavin Williamson in the cockpit of a Typhoon on his visit to RAF Coninsgby, Lincolnshire, last week

He certainly reinforced that theory by backing drone strikes against British citizens serving with Islamic State militants abroad and expressed disgust that IRA killers can walk free while former members of the Armed Forces are pursued by lawyers for alleged misdeeds 40 years ago. What’s more, he’s strongly criticised the Kremlin for its increased naval activity around our shores.

Throughout his career, Mr Williamson has often been under-estimated by party grandees as a lightweight.

But the father of two – who is married to a former primary school teacher – has a fearsome work-rate and an eye for detail.

When he was made Parliamentary private secretary to David Cameron in 2013, he became the PM’s intelligence-gatherer. Mutinous Tory MPs would barely notice the smiley Williamson standing at the edge of gatherings, unaware he was silently taking note of their grumblings – information that was gold dust to a PM with a small majority.

But the father of two – who is married to a former primary school teacher – has a fearsome work-rate and an eye for detail

The silken skills helped Mr Williamson become Chief Whip in 2016.

Again, he was underestimated.

Would-be Tory rebels boasted they would defy ‘that teenager’ – until they spotted the pet tarantula he kept on his desk. Their boldness faltered when he took Cronus out of its glass tank and gave it a stroke.

Named after a Greek god who castrated his father before eating his own children to ensure they wouldn’t topple him from power, Cronus was ‘a perfect example of an incredibly clean, ruthless killer and absolutely fascinating’, according to his owner.

His own approach to disciplining Tory backbenchers was more carrot and stick, though he once said: ‘It is surprising what you can achieve with a sharpened carrot.’

While working for Cameron, Mr Williamson finessed his position to something more Europhile and supported Remain in the referendum.

He can now be regarded as a born-again Brexiteer, while his outspoken remarks on IS terrorists, and his splendidly blunt treatment of Europhile Hammond, show him tacking lustily to the Right.

It might therefore be a mistake to think that just because he has no military background and little significant parliamentary experience – he is a hesitant performer at the despatch box – he’ll be unable to cope with the demands of one of the most serious positions in our national affairs.

Gavin Alexander Williamson, who talks contentedly of his childhood being ‘pretty unremarkable’, attended a state primary school and then the local comprehensive, where an interest in politics took hold early.

Like the drippy young character Private Pike (pictured) from TV’s Dad’s Army, Gavin Williamson does not initially inspire much fear or confidence

There was a ‘debate’ in the Williamson household when he became a Conservative, but his parents let him follow his instincts. Friends say it was an early example of him insisting on being his own man.

While studying for a social science degree at Bradford University, he was national chairman of the Conservative Collegiate Forum (the Tories’ national student organisation at that time) in 1996. Politically it was the era of John Major, Westminster sleaze and widespread public fatigue with the Conservative government. To proclaim yourself a Tory was hardly the best way to win friends.

It didn’t worry Mr Williamson: he just thought Conservatism made sense while Labour’s approach to tax and spend did not.

After university, a job with the Tory Party beckoned but his father urged caution. ‘He told me to get a real job in the real world… my Dad said it was not good working in politics,’ Mr Williamson has said.

One of his first jobs was as a salesman – selling Aga-style ovens to middle-class Yorkshire housewives. He then moved to Staffordshire to work for a pottery firm, where he was known as Tigger ‘because of his seamless energy’.

Another nickname, when he became managing director, was ‘the baby-faced assassin’ – a result of the tough decisions he sometimes had to take as the company fought to survive.

Philip Hammond has been left nursing a few bruises after Mr Williamson told the RAF to refuse to fly him round the world until he settled an overdue departmental bill for official flights

After several years of grassroots volunteer work – leafleting and the like – he was chosen by the Conservatives to fight the solidly Tory seat of South Staffordshire in 2010. In his maiden Commons speech, he proudly described himself as ‘one of the few potters to sit in the House’. (A wit claimed to mishear this as ‘one of the few plotters’ which, given recent events, might have been more appropriate.)

When Cameron lost the EU referendum and quit in June 2016, his loyal aide was bereft, angry, and uncertain. His patron had been vaporised.

But within a couple of days, Theresa May was on the phone asking him to lead her campaign for the Tory leadership.

Mrs May had seen what an operator Mr Williamson was: his organisation, his intense work rate and his bonhomie with a parliamentary party that she herself knew little of.

His working-class background also helped. He was most certainly not another of those gilded Notting Hill types who had done so much to tarnish the Tory reputation during the Cameron years.

It’s said that Mr Williamson burns with desire to exact revenge on the Foreign Secretary for Cameron’s downfall

Earlier this year, a BBC docu-drama, Theresa vs Boris, portrayed Mr Williamson as a jaw-clenching tough guy driven by unspoken hatreds and personal feuds.

One of those feuds may be with Boris Johnson. It’s said that Mr Williamson burns with desire to exact revenge on the Foreign Secretary for Cameron’s downfall.

Is it too much to imagine the two men sizing each other up as possible future rivals for the Tory leadership?

When he was running the Whips’ Office, Mr Williamson was endlessly asked about Francis Urquhart, the fictitious Chief Whip in Michael Dobbs’s political drama House Of Cards. Dobbs gave him a copy of the book which bore the inscription, ‘This is a work of fiction, not instruction’.

Even so, there may have been something of Urquhart in the way Mr Williamson smoked out a backbench plot against Mrs May. And, last month, did he knife then Defence Secretary Michael Fallon following claims of sexually inappropriate behaviour?

Did the ‘baby-faced assassin’ strike, easing Sir Michael out of office and propose himself for the job?

Not such a ‘stupid boy’ after all, perhaps.

Additional reporting by Richard Marsden