However embarrassing the present cabinet is – however clumsy and shamefully inept – some kind of reasoning can usually be detected in the selection of its personnel. Boris Johnson, David Davis, Philip Hammond, Michael Gove, Sajid Javid, Amber Rudd: you can see why Theresa May might have chosen them. For what they brought to the cabinet table in terms of political shrewdness, or for their popularity; or because they reflected a population that isn’t all white men; or for their steadiness; or for their public charm; or, if none of the above, because it was safer to have them sitting inside the tent than raging in the rain outside.

Little of East Kilbride’s industry, welcomed with sticks of pineapple and cheese and a nice piece in the paper, lives on

An exception is Liam Fox. Is he charming or steady? Does he have a following? To explain his presence as the secretary of state for international trade (and president of the board of trade) you have to leave every box unticked until you reach the better-inside-tent argument. And even then, you have to wonder that his disgrace should be so completely excused and forgotten.

Fox was born in September 1961 in East Kilbride, the first of Scotland’s postwar new towns. When I went to work there five years later, it still retained some of the innocence and optimism of Bill Forsyth’s film Gregory’s Girl (though that film was shot in a later and arguably inferior new town, Cumbernauld). Scotland had five, in all, and like their equivalents in England and Wales they had their origins in 1946 legislation designed to address the problems of city slums and bombed housing.

In Scotland, that mainly meant Glasgow. East Kilbride residents had left behind some of the shoddiest and most overcrowded and insanitary living conditions in the western world. They paid their rents to a public body, the development corporation, and their new homes had gardens and bathrooms, and lay at walking distance from little parades of shops that were a feature of every neighbourhood; the town-planners had been at work. Just a bus ride away, visible as soon as you crossed the crest of the hill, the old Glasgow sat smouldering in the Clyde valley. It was difficult, if you thought about this contrast, not to see the benevolent hand of the state.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest De Hepburn and John Gordon Sinclair in Gregory’s Girl. ‘When I went to work in East Kilbride, it still retained some of the innocence and optimism of Bill Forsyth’s film.’ Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

I worked on the local paper. “New jobs” were often mentioned in the headlines. Glasgow’s shipyards and engineering works had begun to close, while East Kilbride had industrial sites waiting to be filled. It had engineering factories too, producing Rolls-Royce jet engines and mining machinery from Mavor & Coulson; but the companies that arrived in the 1960s tended to be in the business of consumer goods.

One of them, BSR (which stood for Birmingham Sound Reproducers), made the auto-changing turntable for the Dansette record player, of which at least a million were made over 20 years. An incoming firm might invite local reporters to a reception in one of Glasgow’s grand old railway hotels, or take them for a hop over the town in a light plane: both were treats meant to secure good publicity – which was rarely withheld, though as it turned out the west of Scotland’s grip on the new industries of the mid-twentieth century was far from secure.

Fox, whose father was a schoolteacher, was too young to be a proper witness to these events, and by the time he was a teenager, in the 1970s, the gloss had worn off. In common with a significant percentage of urban west Scotland, he had Irish ancestry. He grew up with his two sisters and a brother in a Catholic household and went to a Catholic comprehensive, St Bride’s, before studying medicine at Glasgow University. Some of his beliefs, such as his disapproval of abortion and same-sex marriage, have their grounding in this childhood, but otherwise his politics run against every expectation.

In the 1980s, Labour in Scotland was still seen as the natural home of the Catholic vote, but Fox became president of his university’s Conservative association, and as a 22-year-old contested a local council seat as a Tory – at a time when, thanks to factory closures and Margaret Thatcher’s hectoring, the Tories in Scotland had reached unprecedented heights of unpopularity.

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Adam Werritty came into the picture after Fox, an MP since 1992, met him at a Burns supper organised by Edinburgh University’s Young Conservatives. Fox was 36 and Werritty 19. Some time later, the older man hired the younger as a paid intern in his parliamentary office and put him up, rent free, in his London apartment. When Fox married another doctor in 2005, Werritty was his best man. What they had in common intellectually was their pro-Americanism, which was channelled through an organisation (a charity until that status was removed) called Atlantic Bridge, which Fox had set up to promote US-UK relations, with Werritty as its chief executive. After Fox became defence secretary in 2010, Werritty had business cards printed that described him as Fox’s adviser, though he had no security clearance and the source of his funding and the purpose of his presence in Fox’s official life were obscure. An investigation led by the then cabinet secretary, Gus O’Donnell, found that over 16 months Werritty had called on Fox 22 times at his office in the Ministry of Defence and attended 40 of Fox’s 70 official engagements; and that Fox sometimes barred civil servants from meetings where Werritty was present. Fox resigned in October 2011.

Time moved on. The false business cards became the thing about the Fox-Werritty affair that people best remembered. After David Cameron resigned in the wake of last year’s referendum, Fox stood in the Tory leadership race, as he had in 2005, and this time was eliminated at the first ballot with 4.9% of the votes. But how many people said, “The nerve of him”? Not many. A blatant disregard for what some might call the morality of public office has done him no lasting damage.

This week he launched his trade bill with a speech that declared it “morally unacceptable” that the richest countries in the world, which had benefited the most from free trade, were imposing trade barriers and “beginning to pull up the drawbridge behind them”. He said Britain should use Brexit to “champion the intellectual cause for free trade” and rediscover the pioneering spirit that led to the repeal of the corn laws in 1846.

There is some way to go. If exports are reckoned as a proportion of GDP, Britain is the second lowest exporter in the EU, beaten only by Greece. “Politics is very binary,” he said. “You either shape the world around you or you will be shaped by the world around you.” Perhaps he means that free trade has winners and losers: British manufacturing was a big winner in 1846, and not so much in 1966 or 1996 or any other recent decade, whether inside the EU or out of it. Very little of East Kilbride’s new industry, welcomed with sticks of pineapple and cheese and a nice little piece in the paper, now survives.

And who would bet a chlorine-washed chicken against the US being the winner in any trade deal that America’s man in the cabinet manages to secure?

• Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist