Fallon’s 8,000-mile trip is designed to give him a way to attack Labour

There must be easier ways of escaping the endless debate about the EU referendum than travelling 8,000 miles away. Yet that’s exactly what Michael Fallon did this week. The Defence Secretary pitched up in Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands on Wednesday, the first such visit for more than a decade.

What was Fallon up to? He is a very enthusiastic minister, to be fair, impressing colleagues in every job with the hours he puts in and the number of miles he clocks up on foreign trips and visits across the country. But the timing still seemed rather suspicious, and given Fallon is expected to back staying in the European Union, he had no reason to go into hiding, unlike his colleagues Michael Gove and Boris Johnson. Curiouser still was the minister’s decision to talk more about the threat of a bearded chap in Islington than the newly-elected Argentine administration. “The biggest threat at the moment isn’t Argentina, actually, it is Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party,” he told the BBC.

Corbyn suggested in 2013 that the Islands could be governed with a “degree of joint administration”, while his head of communications, Seumas Milne, called the referendum in that year – 99.8 per cent of islanders backed continuing to live under British rule – a “North Korean-style ballot”.

Fallon wasn’t travelling to the Falklands to talk to the islanders – Michael Summers, the chairman of the Falklands Legislative Assembly, has already said he does not think Corbyn is a threat – but to speak to voters back home. It was quite an effort to go to, to make a warning about the threat posed by a man who is not going to be elected as prime minister, to the Islands over whose future he will never have any say. But it was another chance for Fallon’s brief to be used as a weapon against Labour.

This approach started during the election, with Fallon’s now-famous dead cat speech, in which the minister (looking, it has to be said, as though he’d rather not be there) warned voters that because Ed Miliband had “stabbed his brother in the back” in the Labour leadership contest, he would happily “stab the UK in the back” over the nuclear deterrent. The “dead cat” is a strategy deployed by Tory election chief Lynton Crosby, involving flinging a metaphorical feline corpse on to the table to distract everyone from whatever inconvenient conversation they were conducting. It horrified many in Westminster, but it worked, completely overshadowing Labour’s policy announcement about cracking down on those who are non-domiciled for tax purposes.

David Cameron is now rather fixated upon the Lynton Crosby playbook for fighting other parties, and is continuing to wave dead cats around. This is why he doesn’t worry as much as some of his other colleagues about there being too many ministers on the Remain side in the EU referendum, and it is also why he is so keen to kick Labour, even when it is down. It also why he is unlikely to fret too much at the departure of the much-admired Tim Montgomerie from the Conservative Party: the activist and newspaper columnist’s concerns about the direction of the party often tally with what the Prime Minister sees, rightly or wrongly, as the key ways in which it can keep winning.

So Michael Fallon is kept rather busy, as Defence questions in the House of Commons has now turned from quite a technical session in which backbenchers who really knew their stuff asked questions about procurement into a political knockabout session. Fallon can do both: he has an eye for detail, but he has also been used many times by his party for more aggressive, partisan jobs, including defending the party on Newsnight and Today whenever there was a political mess.

Defence is now a bigger problem for Labour even than voters’ nervousness about its economic policy, because of the split in the party on Trident, and because the Conservatives are being so ruthless at exploiting that split. They have attracted the ire of Labour peers, including Lord West, the former First Sea Lord, and Lord Robertson, former Defence Secretary, for plotting to delay the “main gate” vote on Trident so that it takes place closer to the Labour Party conference, in order to cause maximum political chaos.

But the Labour leadership is, first of all, quite relaxed about the potential for chaos over the nuclear deterrent, as it is a way of forcing many anti-Corbyn Labour MPs into a confrontation with their pro-Corbyn members and, second, because it clearly doesn’t think it is as important an issue as those who support Trident renewal do. For two weeks running, a substantive discussion on the Trident policy review at the Shadow Cabinet has been delayed, the second time because there were, according to sources, “more important issues” to talk about, such as Europe and the economy. Shadow Cabinet members and senior former frontbenchers alike were infuriated by this suggestion, pointing out that there are few things more important than defence of the realm. “Trident is a much bigger issue for us than the economy, now,” says one senior MP. “Which just shows how bad things have got given what a big issue the economy was in the election.”

Cameron is determined to use these big issues to weaken Labour so much that even if the party’s MPs do manage to organise themselves around one plausible alternative leader (which is difficult enough given the number of airship-sized egos floating around the party), they will have to spend years repairing their toxic brand. If the Tories achieve that sort of long-lasting weakening of Labour, they’ll consider a trip thousands of miles across the world more than worth it.