Two British women go on holiday: one is imprisoned in Iran, the other holds secret meetings in Israel. What did Liam Fox do?

If Liam Fox has any human feeling for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, he hid it well. For Priti Patel, however, he did have sympathy

Liam Fox caused outrage during his slot on the Today programme (Reuters)

If you settled down with an octuple espresso, a vat of Modafinil pills and infinite time, with the brief to design a vignette of a government in a corkscrew spin, you’d never invent one better than Liam Fox produced in a few minutes this morning. And he wasn’t even trying.

The good doctor joined John Humphrys on Today nominally to discuss his work as Secretary of State for Pretending International Trade Won’t Collapse After Brexit. But it wasn’t until the chat moved from chlorinated chicken to the holiday misadventures of two female compatriots that one sensed, possibly for the first time ever, the point of Liam Fox. As an emblem of a crumbling and revolting government, he is a star.

Charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe remains in an Iranian jail more than 18 months after being arrested on the holiday she took to introduce her toddler daughter to her family. Thanks to Boris Johnson’s latest imbecility, in misinforming a Commons committee that she was training journalists, any prison sentence might be inflated by five years. If only someone had trained Boris to check facts in his quote-inventing days at The Times, she might feel she wouldn’t be in this hideous predicament now.

International Development Secretary Priti Patel remains in the Cabinet, meanwhile, after selflessly carving beach time from her Israeli holiday to meet Benjamin Netanyahu and other giants of the Jewish state. Patel never mentioned that to No 10 or the Foreign Office before the event, or after it when by eeriest happenstance she suddenly advocated giving foreign aid to – wait for it, wait for it; it’s worth the wait – the Israeli army.

THE. ISRAELI. ARMY.

To recap, then, one innocent woman who expected the Foreign Office’s help faces a dramatically worse punishment thanks to the Foreign Secretary. Another, guilty of a monumental breach of ethics, appears to face no punishment at all.

If it weren’t for the heartrending position of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, you could almost be grateful for such a surreal juxtaposition. With a government like this, one develops a tolerance. Where once a case of venality or stupidity or lunacy sent the head snapping back like an Anthony Joshua uppercut, the senses gradually become jaded until you can barely bother raising a sardonic eyebrow.

Thanks to the instance of Jungian synchronicity that combined the two holiday tales within the one radio interview, the capacity for horrified astonishment was restored this morning.

Admittedly, Fox was the ideal person to discuss the perils of foreign travel. It was his jaunts to distant parts with his friend Adam Werrity that cost him the Defence Secretary job so recently vacated by that most chivalrous of knights, Sir Michael Fallon.

A week ago, Fallon would have been wheeled on the Today show to deploy his gift for defending the indefensible. In the absence of one disgraced Cabinet minister, it fell to another, in the weaselly shape of Fox, to stick up for two more.

What was peculiarly repulsive here was his tone. “First of all,” said Fox when asked about Johnson’s mistake, “it’s important we keep this in perspective.” And which perspective might that be, you wondered? The perspective of a Brexit ultra ally who, being too cocky and idle to read a brief, made the most damaging false claim imaginable about someone facing trial in Iran?

Or the perspective of a woman facing years of hell as a result, separated from her tiny child in a country not known for its reverence for human rights? Fox didn’t specify, but you might make a guess.

“Well,” he said, asked if Johnson should publicly admit he was mistaken, “we all make slips of the tongue.” We do, though, don’t we though? Just the other night, I was trying to express my admiration for Liam Fox, and it came out all garbled as “a****** of a dodgepot w*****, and a c********* m********** t***.”

If Fox has any human feeling for Zaghari-Ratcliffe, he hid it stoically. For Patel, he did have sympathy. Was he surprised she requested a private meeting with the Israeli PM without telling the Foreign Secretary? Eschewing the obvious reply (“What, this Foreign Secretary? You might as well tell the cat”), he said it wasn’t against the rules.

Would he himself have done that? “When I’m on holiday I doubt my wife would give me very much time to do anything ...” he said, optimistically anticipating a snug bar titter of recognition that never came. If he took Werrity to all those top level meetings, you wondered, why wouldn’t he take his missus to tea with Bibi?

Still, it’s a stroke of luck that male treatment of women isn’t a live Westminster issue at the minute, or that portrait of Mrs Fox as a rolling pin-wielding harridan might have sounded inelegantly timed.

In less than five minutes Liam Fox projected casual sexism, callous unconcern for the vulnerable, disdain for ministerial ethics, blithe relaxedness about grotesque incompetence, and complacency born of knowing the PM is far too weak to sack anyone for anything other than groping.

It’s another slice of luck, in this climate, that no one remembers the joke Fox told a Christmas party in 2000. “What do you call four dogs and a blackbird? The Spice Girls.”

Well, we all make the odd slip of the tongue – and bless him, he apologised. So let’s keep that to ourselves, and be thankful that the Bernard Manning of Brexit survives to condense so much that is tragicomically disgusting about this government into so very few words.