What do you do when a country is in crisis? You send in the army. And that’s exactly what two of the finest representatives of HM Armed Forces in parliament have taken it upon themselves to do, in light of the Tory party going a bit JG Ballard.
Captain Ben Wallace of the Scots Guards was out on manoeuvres last night, insisting to the Times that he absolutely, definitely, 100 per cent wants to remain Defence Secretary. This is despite well-sourced reports popping up two days ago in the Mail on Sunday quoting ‘friends’ of Wallace which suggested he could become a unity candidate if Liz Truss quits, voluntarily or not.
There has been some speculation that Wallace might resign in protest if Truss bins her pledge to increase defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP by the end of the decade. Yet in the paper of record this morning, Wallace was a model of Pyongyang party piety, rebuking his colleagues for playing ‘political parlour games’ and insisting:
I want to be the Secretary of State for defence until I finish. I love the job I do and we have more to do. I want the prime minister to be the prime minister and I want to do this job.
And now, just hours later, Wallace’s junior Major James Heappey of the Rifles has been out on the airwaves too, doing another ‘helpful’ intervention of the kind we’ve come to expect from the MoD. First, he dropped the entire cabinet into the current mini-Budget row, telling Times Radio:
It’d be completely disingenuous to claim on that morning, when the cabinet was presented with the mini-Budget, that there was anybody sat around the table who said that it was a bad idea.
Mini-Wallace then told LBC that the government still supports a 3 per cent defence pledge, before adding that he would join his boss in quitting the government if the promise were to be ditched. With de facto prime minister Jeremy Hunt preparing to swing his axe, let’s see how the tactical machinations of Wallace and Heappey fare against the might of the Treasury…
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