Chris Lloyd looks at the rise and fall of Sir Michael Fallon, the first casualty of Westminster’s sexual abuse of power scandal, who started his political career as the well regarded MP for Darlington

TWENTY-FIVE years ago, when The Northern Echo asked the then Darlington MP Michael Fallon what he would like his epitaph to be, he replied: “God caught his eye.”

Mr Fallon’s political epitaph is now likely to be that his own roving eye caught sight of a female journalist and his roving fingers repeatedly touched her knee.

It is a remarkable fall from grace. In the Cabinet under two Prime Ministers, Mr Fallon was regarded as very competent and hugely dependable. David Cameron knighted him, and he provided vital ballast for Theresa May’s lightweight administration. Whenever there was a crisis, Sir Michael was wheeled out to perform unflappably under the harshest fire and to steady the ship, as only a senior Defence Secretary can.

Politically, he was the ultimate safe pair of hands.

But, privately, those hands got him into trouble, and he has become the first casualty of the sex-pest scandal.

It is a disappointing end to a reputable political career that begun in Darlington 35 years ago. In 1982, he was a researcher and writer from Perthshire, well thought of in national Conservative circles, who arrived as “a 30-year-old bachelor”, as the Echo of the day repeatedly said. In February 1983, the Labour MP, Ted Fletcher, died, launching the town into the frenzy of a nationally-important by-election.

Labour leader Michael Foot was wobbly and the SDP – the middle-ground breakaway group – was scenting success. But in the by-election, the SDP faded and Fallon came on strongly to claim second place.

His positive showing emboldened Margaret Thatcher, his idol, and less than two months later she called a General Election at which he was victorious.

As a Thatcherite in the North-East during the miners’ strike, he was controversial, urging fundamental reform of all nationalised industries. Speaking at Sunderland Polytechnic, he was punched in the face and had a car driven at him; opening Darlington Memorial Hospital fete, he was egged for promoting privatisation of the NHS.

But he also immersed himself in the town. He bought a house in Victoria Embankment, he adopted the Quakers as his football team and he was involved in almost every walk of life. He was forever in the papers, once getting dressed up in an England rugby kit on a snowy day and then pursuing Private Eye for printing “fabricated slush”. When Mrs Thatcher made him an education minister, he started a national debate by saying that the Aussie TV soap Neighbours was “junk”.

It didn’t work. He lost his marginal seat in 1992 to Alan Milburn by 2,798 votes.

“It was a wrench,” he said earlier this year when campaigning on High Row where he was received with surprising warmth. “I’d spent ten years of my life here. I married here, my two boys were born here, one in Greenbank and one in the Memorial. It was sad to lose but it is heartening to hear how many people remember how I helped – usually their mums and dads because it was 25 years ago.”

After the defeat, he joined Duncan Bannatyne in the care home business and, in 1995, the pair started the Just Learning chain of children’s nurseries which they sold in 2001 for £22m.

In 1997, Fallon returned to the Commons as MP for Sevenoaks and began to ascend the greasy pole once more. By 2010, with his hair that was youthfully black in his Darlington days turning into distinguished grey, he had become the Tories’ senior statesman. So safe were his hands that only days ago he was still thought of as an interim Prime Minister should the wobbly May fall and Boris Johnson be rejected.

Then came the revelation that in 2002 he had inappropriately touched a journalist’s knee at a party conference.

In his defence, Sir Michael, 65, said behaviour that was acceptable ten or 15 years ago – a generation ago – was now beyond the pale. Whether his wife, Wendy, would agree that such behaviour was acceptable at any time since they were married in 1986 is something we have yet to discover.

BUT perhaps Sir Michael is right.

On May 15, 1983, at 2.26am, after a long day of events which coincided with his 31st birthday, he crashed his car on the Victoria Road roundabout near his Darlington home. He was more than twice the legal alcohol limit. It was front page news.

On June 9, 1983, he triumphed at the General Election, winning 4,000 more votes than at the by-election just 12 weeks earlier.

Then, on July 3, 1983, he was convicted of drink-driving, fined £120 and banned for 18 months. Again front page news.

The crash clearly hadn’t harmed him electorally, and the conviction soon faded from the town’s memory.

Nowadays, no politician could survive a drink-driving eve-of-poll crash. It would be electoral suicide because nowadays, drink-driving is regarded as a heedless, heinous crime with innocent potential victims.

But back in the day it was viewed very differently, quite lightly.

So over the course of a generation, times change. Society’s revised attitude to drink-driving has made modern roads better and safer. Now Sir Michael has discovered that attitudes to sexual abuse of power have also changed, and only a creature from a different age will fail to see that society will be better, and fairer, for it.