page_title: Michael Fallon
section_title: Secretary of State for Defence (2014–2017)
hierarchical_section_title: Michael Fallon / Parliamentary career / Secretary of State for Defence (2014–2017)
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Michael Fallon während der Münchner Sicherheitskonferenz 2016
context_page_description: Sir Michael Cathel Fallon KCB is a British politician who served as Secretary of State for Defence from 2014 to 2017. A member of the Conservative Party, Fallon served as the Member of Parliament for Sevenoaks from 1997 to 2019, having previously served as the MP for Darlington from 1983 to 1992.
  Fallon served as Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party from 2010 to 2012 and Minister of State for Business and Enterprise from 2012 to 2014. He served as Minister of State at the Department of Energy and Climate Change from 2013 to 2014 and Minister of State for Portsmouth in 2014, before serving as Defence Secretary under David Cameron and Theresa May. He resigned after being implicated in the 2017 Westminster sexual misconduct allegations.
context_section_description: In February 2016, the week after a leaked United Nations report had found the Saudi-led coalition guilty of conducting "widespread and systematic" air strikes against civilians in Yemen – including camps for internally displaced people, weddings, schools, hospitals, religious centers, vehicles and markets – and the same day the International Development Select Committee had said that the UK should end all arms exports to Saudi Arabia because of ongoing, large-scale human rights violations by the Kingdom's armed forces in Yemen, Fallon was criticised for attending a £450-a-head dinner for an arms-industry trade-body.
  In December 2016, Fallon admitted that UK-supplied internationally banned cluster munitions had been used in Saudi Arabia's bombing campaign in Yemen.
  In April 2017, Fallon confirmed that the UK would use its nuclear weapons in a "pre-emptive initial strike" in "the most extreme circumstances" on BBC Radio's Today programme.
  In 2017, Fallon warned that Russia's Zapad 2017 exercise in Belarus and Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast was "designed to provoke us". Fallon falsely claimed that number of Russian troops taking part in exercise could reach 100,000.
caption: Fallon during the Munich Security Conference in 2016
exif: {}