How Ben Wallace became favourite to succeed Boris Johnson

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has emerged as one of the favourites to replace Boris Johnson as Conservative Party leader and prime minister.

Johnson announced he is to stand down as Conservative Party leader from today but plans to hang on as prime minister until his replacement is chosen.

A snap YouGov poll of Conservative Party members has pointed to Wallace as the favourite among Tory party members to take over, beating his potential rivals by a significant margin.

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Wallace beat rivals Liz Truss by 48% to 29%, Penny Mordaunt by 48% to 26%, Rishi Sunak by 51% to 30%, and Jeremy Hunt by 58%to 22%.

Who is Ben Wallace?

Wallace has gone from being a little known politician to one of the most popular cabinet ministers among Tory members in recent years.

And as Johnson and Sunak have faced their respective scandals, the 52-year-old Wallace has “risen almost without a trace to be the champion of the Conservative grassroots – and the beneficiary of his colleagues’ struggles”, wrote Hugo Gye, political editor of the i news site.

A former soldier, Wallace attended Millfield School in Somerset and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. After working as a ski instructor in Austria he was commissioned as an officer into the Scots Guards. During the 1990s he saw service in Northern Ireland, Germany, Cyprus and Central America. “The experience has informed his role as a minister,” said Tim Shipman in The Sunday Times.

Parliamentary career

He entered politics as a member of the Scottish parliament in 1999. After moving to Lancashire, he became the MP for Wyre and Preston North, formerly Lancaster and Wyre, in 2005 and has been an MP ever since.

Wallace was parliamentary private secretary to Ken Clarke when he was justice secretary. He has also served as a whip, the Northern Ireland minister and security minister.

In 2009, The Garstang Courier revealed that Wallace claimed £175,523 in expenses on top of his £63,000 salary – the fourth highest expenses claim in parliament. Wallace, who had already published his expenses on his own website, said that the figure reflected the fact that the constituency “has approximately a 20% larger electorate than the average one in England”.

He supported Remain in the 2016 EU referendum, but is a long-standing ally of Boris Johnson and supported him in the 2019 Conservative leadership election. He was promoted to the cabinet as defence secretary in 2019 when his patron became prime minister.

For his first two years in the post he was out of the spotlight as the Covid pandemic kept defence largely out of the headlines. However, the Afghanistan crisis last summer saw him take centre stage, welling up with emotion during an interview on LBC as he described the harsh realities of the Taliban’s takeover. Shipman at The Sunday Times called it “a rare moment of emotion from a senior politician, one that seemed to crystallise a nation’s disappointment about a shoddy retreat”.

The Ukraine invasion saw his profile rise again. “Wallace has impressed colleagues with his competent and statesmanlike response to the war in Ukraine,” said Ailbhe Rea at The New Statesman. “Now they are asking whether he, an unexpected leadership figure at a time of war, could be the next leader of the Conservative Party and country.”

Leadership chances

This popularity has certainly prompted speculation in Westminster that he could be a candidate to succeed Johnson. Wallace has played down his ambitions to be prime minister in the past, saying that “for someone like me to be defence secretary is just an amazing thing” so he is “not really attracted to anything else”.

His profile with the public has been “relatively low”, but “Tory MPs say his popularity may have begun to make him consider a bid”, said The Guardian. Many of his colleagues believe he would strike a suitably “stark contrast in style to Johnson”. But perhaps the most “outstanding question is whether Wallace really wants the job”, continued the paper, and unlike many of his other rivals, such as Penny Mordant, Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid, he does not yet seem to have a campaign team in place.

One of Wallace’s problems is that he’s seen as a Johnson loyalist. But his other problem is that “he is from the party’s left flank”, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. “Even MPs from the party’s left fear that their candidates will be rejected by the membership and they will end up moving further from the political centre, not closer to it,” Bush said.