Ben Wallace: Who is the defence secretary regularly tipped as the Tories’ next leader?

Ex-soldier’s reluctance to stand for party leadership looking increasingly like good sense and the ideal qualification for the job after months of Conservative chaos

Despite his popularity within the Conservative Party, Ben Wallace declined to join the mass exodus that led to Boris Johnson’s defenestration in July or to run in the ensuing leadership contest eventually won by Liz Truss.

Instead, the defence secretary, 52, shrugged off the encouragement of his peers, insisting he was quite happy where he was.

He did back the winner, however, for which he was rewarded by being allowed to keep his job, in which he has won acclaim for his robust support for Ukraine following Russia’s invasion on 24 February.

Mr Wallace was born in Farnborough, south east London, on 15 May 1970, his father a member of the 1st King’s Dragoon Guards who served in Malaya.

He was educated at Millfield School in Somerset and attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst with a view to following his dad into the British Army, only briefly taking time out to work as a ski instructor in Austria as a young man before eventually enlisting.

Between 1991 and 1998, Mr Wallace rose from second-lieutenant to captain in the Scots Guard, his career seeing him serve in Germany, Cyprus, Belize and Northern Ireland. The latter posting saw him mentioned in dispatches when a patrol he was leading captured an entire IRA active service unit in April 1993, preventing a bomb attack on British soldiers.

Thereafter, he was transferred from the Active List to the Regular Army Reserve of Officers and became a Conservative Member of the Scottish Parliament, representing the North East Scotland constituency between 1999 and 2003 and earning the nickname “Captain Fantastic” from a Scottish newspaper, a fact he revealed to Nick Robinson on his Political Thinking podcast with no little embarrassment.

It was during this period that he married political researcher Liza Cooke, with whom he now has two sons and a daughter. His wife worked as a part-time parliamentary assistant in his office until as recently as 30 April 2019.

From there, Mr Wallace returned south of the border and won the Lancaster and Wyre seat from Labour in 2005. Now redesignated Wyre and Preston North, he has held it ever since.

His first job in government was serving as parliamentary private secretary to the veteran cabinet minister Ken Clarke, then justice secretary.

In 2008, Mr Wallace was named “Campaigner of the Year” by The Spectator after leading calls for improved transparency and the reform of parliamentary expenses, although he was later found to have the fourth-highest expenses claim of any MP (£175,523) in the year that scandal erupted over the issue, an occurrence the MP explained by pointing out the sheer size of his constituency.

Ben Wallace (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

Since then, he has served as assistant whip between 2014 and 2015, minister of state for Northern Ireland between 2015 and 2017, then minister of state for security and economic crime between 2016 and 2019.

He was in position in that latter role during the Islamist terror attacks on London of 2017 and the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, Wiltshire, in 2018.

He has served as defence secretary since 24 July 2019, succeeding Penny Mordaunt, who she was given short-shrift by Mr Johnson after just three months in the job in order to reward Mr Wallace for championing him when his leadership campaign came under attack from Michael Gove.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, the then-Northern Ireland secretary had warned that the then-justice secretary posed a national security risk because of his chronic indiscretion.

“When I was a government whip and Michael was the chief whip, the office leaked like a sieve,” Mr Wallace said.

“Important policy and personnel details made their way to the papers. Michael seems to have an emotional need to gossip, particularly when drink is taken, as it all too often seemed to be.

“UK citizens deserve to know that when they go to sleep at night their secrets and their nation’s secrets aren’t shared in the newspaper column of the prime minister’s wife the next day, or traded away with newspaper proprietors over fine wine.”

Now a defence secretary under two prime ministers, the plainspeaking Mr Wallace has impressed with his emotional response to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer and his unwavering support for Ukraine, a welcome constant Volodymyr Zelensky has been grateful for after the removal of Mr Johnson from Downing Street and the elevation of Ms Truss from foreign secretary.

With the new PM already under threat, Mr Wallace’s loyalty could soon find itself sorely tested once more and calls for his leadership candidacy to be swiftly revived.