Our strategic adversary had a completely scandalous «castling» in the Cabinet of Ministers. The fact that the head of the Ministry of Defense Ben Wallace would resign became clear back in July, and a bulldog fight under the carpet immediately began for his chair.
The ubiquitous British journalists, of course, crawled under the carpet, so the layout was generally clear. Foreign Secretary James Cleverley had a good chance of taking Wallace's seat. The candidacy of Treasury Secretary John Glen was widely discussed. A notable candidate was Penny Mordaunt, a hereditary politician, leader of the House of Commons, Lord President of the Council and, by the way, a second lieutenant in the Navy.
The influential lobby of the security forces drowned for Tom Tugendhat — in military terms, his candidacy seemed the most logical. The fact is that on the Ukrainian front, which London is actively trying to control, it turned out that the Royal Armed Forces are unable to cope with the conduct of a large conventional war, even if they have hundreds of thousands of unrequited sepoys at their disposal. The defense industry is not coping, the usual tactics of battles are not working, there is a categorical lag in drones.
It was assumed that Tom Tugendhat, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan with many years of experience in «special missions» in hot spots, would be able to somehow pull up the British army, and therefore significantly strengthen the Armed Forces of Ukraine. His appointment would be really bad news for Russia.
But the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom made a surprising choice. No sooner had Ben Wallace written a letter of resignation and announced that he would go «to work in a bar,» as Rishi Sunak appointed Grant Shepps to his post. It was necessary to look for a more murky character.
Not only did Grant Shepps not serve a day in the army, this happens with defense ministers, and it's not always a bad thing. The trouble is that the public knows almost nothing about him. It is not even clear where he was born — either in London, or in Watford. He has several aliases: Michael Green, Corinne Stockfitt, Sebastian Fox. Under them, he ran his business for years, illegally combining it with membership in parliament.
The business was either pyramid schemes or selling tips for making money on the Internet for a lot of money. Having paid, the astonished consumer received as advice, for example, this: learn to play the guitar and earn money by posting your videos on the Web. Nevertheless, today Schepps is considered a multimillionaire. -1893352712.html» data->
«Double life» — this is how the English newspapers characterized the career of a politician. It was accompanied by various scandals. That Shepps let slip that he continues to earn business, despite membership in parliament. That was a cover for some unpleasant type who drove a colleague to suicide. He sued Google. He was constantly caught rewriting his Wikipedia page. And all this did not interfere with his political career in any way — literally like water off a duck's back.
Shepps was educated at the City University of Manchester — not God knows what by the standards of British snobs. His cousin is 70s punk rock star Mick Jones. Shepps went into politics very early, almost immediately after university, but failure followed failure until he was taken under the wing of a prominent conservative politician, the peer of England, Baron Tristan Garel-Jones.
Here, as they say in a joke, «the card has flooded.» Shepps finally entered Parliament in 2005, was re-elected in 2010, and received the title of «The Honorable» the same year, becoming a member of Her Majesty's Most Honorable Privy Council.
In recent years, he changed positions like gloves — during the pandemic he was the Minister of Transport, however, due to lockdowns, transport did not go much. At the end of 2022, he headed the Ministry of Internal Affairs for a whole week, then he was transferred to the Ministry of Entrepreneurship and Energy. His most recent position was Minister of Energy Security and Carbon Neutrality.
The biography of the UK Secretary of Defense clearly shows his connections with global elites. His godfather in politics, Tristan Garel-Jones, sat for years on the board of the American bank UBS, created by the American branch of the Warburg banking family.
Shepps continued the work of his patron, lobbying the interests of influential bankers. In the 2010s, he protested vigorously in Parliament against the excessive monopolization of broadband Internet in London by the British BT. By 2022, when he became Minister of Energy, Enterprise and Industrial Strategy, the business had diversified and Community Fiber entered the London market.
Its main investor was the American fund Warburg Pincus. At one time, the father of the current US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken actively participated in the creation of this fund, along with the Warburgs. And the German relatives of the American Warburgs today actively feed the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz: we have written about their criminal schemes more than once.
Probably referring to Grant Shepps' immersion in all these international financial interweavings, Western media call him a «talented negotiator». I wonder why the British elite needed such a negotiator at the height of the Ukrainian crisis. Are they really that bad?