Changing the guard: who will replace Wallace?
The defence secretary has announced that he will leave the cabinet at the next reshuffle, after more than four years; who will step in at the Ministry of Defence?
Reshuffles can happen at dramatic speed. Sometimes those who are changing their roles are taken by surprise; when Viscount Kilmuir was dismissed as lord chancellor by Harold Macmillan in July 1962, he acidly observed to the prime minister than he had been sacked with less notice than a cook. The unflappable premier responded that good cooks were harder to find than good lord chancellors. Some see their fate coming, or have indicated they are happy to move or leave; others are utterly unprepared and leave their interview shocked and upset. Then there is Lord Hill of Oareford, who, legend has it, tried to resign as a junior education minister in 2012 only to be brushed aside by a distracted and harassed David Cameron, who told him to “carry on the good work” and hastened to his next appointment.
Ben Wallace, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Defence, has short-circuited this routine. He had made it known that he was interested in becoming secretary-general of NATO when Norway’s Jens Stoltenberg stood down in the autumn, and for a while looked like the leading candidate; certainly he was qualified for the role and would have been a good choice. His discreet application came unstuck, however, after the French president, Emmanuel Macron, objected to a British candidate in the wake of Brexit, and President Biden decided to support the grisly cause of Germany’s Ursula von der Leyen, currently president of the European Commission, instead.
Last weekend, Wallace told The Sunday Times that he had decided to stand down as defence secretary, and would leave Parliament at the general election in 2024. There are several motives at work: he has made no secret that he was disappointed and bemused to miss out on the job as NATO chief, remarking to The Sunday Times “Why do you not support your closest ally when they put forward a candidate? I think it’s a fair question.” And he is right to feel a degree of pique, having seemingly been ruled out both because of what he was—a British candidate—and because of what he was not—a former head of government or a woman. He is also, and I can’t repeat this often enough, a vastly superior choice to von der Leyen, who was defence minister of Germany and was terrible at it.
It is not just that. Wallace’s seat in the House of Commons, Wyre and Preston North, will disappear because of the boundary changes which come into effect at the election, its electorate carved up between five other constituencies (three notionally Conservative and two Labour). He seems to have little stomach to battle for a nomination elsewhere. Mostly, however, Wallace is tired, and with good reason. He has been defence secretary since July 2019, longer than any Conservative predecessor and the third-longest serving occupant of the post after Denis Healey (1964-70) and Geoff Hoon (1999-2005). Not only that, but he served as security minister at the Home Office for three years before taking over the MoD, totalling seven years in sensitive posts; as he put it, “I’ve spent well over seven years with three phones by my bed”. Take into account that he was first elected as a member of the new Scottish Parliament in 1999, and he has been on the front line for a quarter of a century.
Many will be sorry to see him leave. I hope to write an assessment of his tenure at the MoD in the near future, but he was well regarded, winning substantial funding increases from an always-tight-pursed Treasury and leading Britain’s support for Ukraine after its invasion by Russia in February 2022. He also had a degree of respect from the military as a former soldier, having spent seven years as a regular officer in the Scots Guards, including a tour of Northern Ireland, retiring as a captain in 1998. (He was mentioned in dispatches after an incident in Belfast in which his patrol captured an IRA Active Service Unit preparing to carry out a bomb attack.) Excepting his predecessor Penny Mordaunt’s service in the Royal Naval Reserve, Wallace is the first defence secretary to have worn a uniform since Tom King (1989-92), who had performed National Service with the Somerset Light Infantry, and the first former regular soldier since John Nott (1981-83).
The timing of the reshuffle is not yet fixed, though we think it will be once Parliament returns from the summer recess in September. But Wallace’s decision, and its public nature, give us an unusual opportunity to see how the race for a prize job evolves over several months. What I intend to do, then, is to set out some thoughts and predictions (or hostages to fortune) now, and revisit the situation at the end of August once the ministerial changes are more imminent. What follows is a mixture of gossip, intuition, extrapolation, personal preference and logic (which is often the very last consideration) to pick out the runners and riders.
One process which would be logical on paper but almost never happens in British politics is the promotion of a junior minister to secretary of state in the department. Off the top of my head, I can only think of Ian Gilmour briefly taking over from Peter Carrington as defence secretary in January 1974, his tenure only lasting eight weeks; David Owen becoming foreign secretary in 1977 after the sudden death of Anthony Crosland, having been a minister of state for a few months; and Paul Channon stepping up from minister for trade to head the Department of Trade and Industry when Leon Brittan was forced to resign during the Westland Crisis in early 1986. (Channon had “acted up” twice, immediately after the resignation of Cecil Parkinson as secretary of state in 1983 and while Norman Tebbit recovered from his injuries sustained in the Brighton bombing in 1984.) In all three cases—there may be others but I cannot think of them—these were surprise appointments, and James Callaghan, prime minister from 1976 to 1979, certainly considered Roy Hattersley and Denis Healey for the job of foreign secretary.
Accordingly, Politico’s run-down of possibilities as defence secretary includes James Heappey, currently minister of state for the armed forces and Wallace’s effective deputy. On paper, Heappey makes some sense. Although only 42, he was been at the Ministry of Defence in various roles since 2019, and attended cabinet in his role as veterans’ minister during Liz Truss’s brief premiership. In addition, he was a regular infantry officer from 2004 to 2012, retiring at the rank of major after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan and spending a period as a staff officer at the MoD. Heappey has been an MP since 2015, so he knows the House as well as the department, although it must remain a reservation that he hasn’t served in another portfolio. He was in charge of defence procurement for a few months in 2019-20, and equipment will be a major challenge for Wallace’s successor. Could he emulate Gilmour in 1974 and move from minister of state to the top job?
It is not, at any event, a happy precedent. Gilmour’s tenure as defence secretary was extremely short, much of it occupied by the election campaign of the February 1974 poll. There was virtually no chance to achieve anything except oversee the Army’s ongoing involvement in Operation Banner, the deployment to Northern Ireland, and watch the death toll rise (nine soldiers were killed in his brief time). Gilmour was also an ineffective minister, intellectual but indecisive and felt by some, including the chief whip, Francis Pym, to lack political weight. Heappey would run the risk of the same fate; managing our commitment to Ukraine and tackling procurement, on which the House of Commons Defence Committee has just published a sharply critical report, as well as taking on the implementation of the new Defence Command Paper Refresh, would be a daunting challenge for an experienced minister and might overwhelm a more junior appointee. Heappey will not, I suspect, get the nod.
Two more names can be crossed off the list, in my opinion. James Cleverly would be ill advised to switch from the senior role of foreign secretary to take on the MoD. Although he is a senior officer in the Army Reserves—a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Artillery now holding a staff job in 1st (UK) Armoured Division—he has never been a defence minister but has served for two and a half years as a junior minister in the Foreign Office and foreign secretary since September 2022. He has been a success in that role, combining qualities of approachability, diplomacy and straightforwardness to deal with our political allies while Wallace has concentrated on delivering the ‘hard power’ of arms to Ukraine. It would require huge pressure from the prime minister to induce him to accept what is at best a sideways move.
I would also rule out Johnny Mercer, minister of veterans’ affairs at the Cabinet Office. He is another former regular officer, a gunner like Cleverly, who served from 2003 to 2013, retiring as a captain. He passed the All Arms Commando Course, entitling him to wear the famous green beret, and served three tours of duty in Afghanistan. Elected to the House of Commons for Plymouth Moor View in 2015, he was motivated to enter politics because of the shortcomings of provision for ex-military personnel and is now in this third stint looking after veterans’ affairs. There is no doubt that the cause is close to his heart, but he is a polarising figure; his honesty and lack of political veneer endear him to some but others feel he doesn’t listen to opinions he doesn’t want to hear. With his wife, Felicity, he also often finds himself in unseemly spats on social media, which would be an impossibility as defence secretary, and there is a lingering fear that he lacks judgement. Giving him the nod would be a risk, and Rishi Sunak has not demonstrated an enormous appetite for risk since becoming prime minister in October last year.
Tom Tugendhat is a possibility. Currently serving in Wallace’s old job of security minister at Suella Braverman’s Home Office, he was an effective and high-profile chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee from 2017 to 2022 and used it as a platform to launch a bid for the Conservative Party leadership in July 2022. He served in the Army Reserve from 2003 to 2013, retiring as a lieutenant colonel, and took on several significant roles in the Intelligence Corps, being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Latterly he was military assistant to General Sir David Richards as chief of the Defence Staff. He has considerable experience in defence security policy, then, though he has only been a minister for 11 months, and only “attends” cabinet rather than being a full member, so defence secretary would be sizeable step up. But he is a confident and persuasive speaker, both in the House of Commons and in the media, and would put a good face on the military.
In policy terms, Tugendhat is hawkish on China, a founder member with Neil O’Brien of the China Research Group. At the MoD he might find that his call in 2020 for the Foreign Office to have more control over British foreign policy came back to bite him. He has visited Ukraine before he became a minister, and last June he said publicly that the UK was not doing enough in terms of supplying equipment to Ukraine. His willingness to criticise the government in the past has not made him universally popular, and as a representative of the Tories’ centrist tendency he has enemies on the right of the party. I imagine his name will be discussed. There may be too many strikes against him, but he is a more-than-plausible candidate.
With the current high profile of select committees, one might expect the chair of the Defence Committee, Tobias Ellwood, to be in the frame. He was a junior defence minister, looking after personnel issues, from 2017 to 2019, and worked in the Foreign Office for three years before that. He was an officer in the Royal Green Jackets from 1991 to 1996, retiring as a captain, and then joined the Reserves; he is now a lieutenant colonel serving with 77th Brigade, a psychological warfare unit that operates in the information warfare area. Ellwood is outspoken and sometimes lonely in his opinions, leading some to regard him as a wayward and unreliable figure. having worked with him tangentially, I would frame it differently: his tiggerish, certainly, seized by sudden enthusiasms, and determined in pushing forward ideas from concept to conclusion. But he sometimes fails to leave time for reflection, which, unfettered as a a secretary of state, he would have to work hard to unlearn. It is also true that he has never been a minister of state, let alone a cabinet minister, so, as for Heappey, he might find defence secretary a challenging leap. Even this week, he has been rocking the boat by pressing the government to re-open the UK’s embassy in Afghanistan. He may be considered but is unlikely to be chosen.
John Glen is being touted as a Treasury nark to run the MoD and implement spending reductions hand-in-glove with the chancellor of the Exchequer. He certainly has strong Great George Street pedigree, having been a Treasury minister since 2018 (apart from spending the Truss era on the backbenches), but he knows the defence world: he was awarded an MA with distinction in international security and strategy by King’s College London via the Royal College of Defence Studies in 2015, and served on the Defence Committee from 2010 to 2012. If Sunak wants to signal that the public purse strings are being tightened as far as defence is concerned, appointing Glen as defence secretary would make the point, but it would do so rather too obviously. It would seem clumsy and cack-handed, and therefore one hopes it is not a strong possibility. Conservative backbenchers might find a Glen appointment disappointing and underwhelming, so I think it is in the category of “unlikely but possible”.
Let’s thinking outside the box for a moment. Jeremy Quin, the paymaster-general, is already in cabinet and was defence procurement minister for two and a half years (2020-22). He has also served in the Home Office and the Cabinet Office, and was a whip for a while. If he is not a flamboyant speaker, he is steady and solid, capable of mastering a brief; he worked in banking and was seconded to HM Treasury to advise on corporate finance during the crisis of 2008-09. At 54, he puts no-one’s nose out of joint, though replacing him in the centre of government might be challenging. His name was not gained currency but if Sunak wishes to be unexciting and defuse any potential tension, Quin is a safe if underwhelming pick.
More radical would be Sir Julian Lewis, chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee. He is a very cerebral man with a peculiar, slightly awkward manner, with the intellectual firepower of Balliol and St Antony’s College, Oxford, where he defended a DPhil thesis on British Military Planning for Post War Strategic Defence, 1942-1947. Lewis chaired the Defence Committee from 2015 to 2019, having been a shadow defence minister 2002-04 and 2005-10 but missing out on ministerial office under the Coalition. His high strategy interests and specialism in nuclear deterrence have seemed old-fashioned but may be staging a comeback as President Putin flexes his muscles, but at 71 he has probably missed the ministerial boat. Sir Julian is, so far as I am aware, the only MP not to use email.
Or Sunak could go for broke. General Lord Dannatt, former chief of the General Staff, was an adviser to the shadow cabinet under David Cameron, but the relationship never quite gelled, although he was nominated to the House of Lords in 2010. He was not given a ministerial post and made it clear he had no wish to act as a special adviser, but he remains a recognisable talking head on defence issues, having been head of the Army 2006-09 and involved in planning for the deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq as assistant chief of the General Staff 2001-03. It was rumoured that he was passed over for chief of the Defence Staff, the armed forces’ senior officer, when Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup’s term was extended by a year, and it is certainly the case that Dannatt can be prickly and abrupt. He has a rather stiff manner but his experience is almost unrivalled and he is a man of personal physical courage, winning the Military Cross in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. He is 72, hardly ready for the glue factory, and would bring a level of military authority unrivalled since Earl Alexander of Tunis was minister of defence in the early 1950s. But he is not a politician, and might not be ideally suited to the last year or so in a fractious parliament.
One other name stands out, as the only member of the cabinet who has done the job before. Penny Mordaunt, currently leader of the House of Commons, became the first female defence secretary in 2019, replacing leaker and spider enthusiast Gavin Williamson, but she was left out of Boris Johnson’s first cabinet as someone who had supported the other candidate, Jeremy Hunt. Her ministerial credentials are impeccable: she has served across seven different departments in 10 different roles, was armed forces minister 2015-16 and then, as paymaster general in the Cabinet Office from 2020 to 2021, she was responsible for the UK’s defensive cyber operations and resilience across government. She has spent more time on the National Security Council than any other serving minister, and has deep personal and constituency links to the armed forces, especially the Royal Navy.
Mordaunt showed well in the initial rounds of the Conservative Party leadership contest last summer, polling well with party members, and was made leader of the House of Commons by Liz Truss partly as an attempt to sideline her; but she has flourished in the post, treading the fine line between executive and government carefully and expertly. Her weekly appearances in the House of Commons for business questions have become a highlight, and she can switch from solemnity to raised-eyebrow dry wit on a sixpence. She has consistently supported the cause of Ukraine, gaining the endorsement of 10 members of the Verkohna Rada, the national assembly, for her steadfastness. Mordaunt was involved in overseeing training for Ukrainian military personnel and civil servants, and was popular enough with the country’s special forces to be given the characteristic blue-and-white shirt, the Telnyashka, which marks them out from regular units.
Penny would be the obvious plug-and-play option, an experienced minister with an acute grasp of geopolitics as well as war-fighting. Her return to the MoD would signal continuing backing for Ukraine and a straightforward, practical approach to management, in many ways not unlike Wallace. Her name must surely be in the frame for the tough calling of defence secretary and it is hard to see who would be a more obvious choice if the selection were purely practical and evidence-based. But politics is not always like that. At the moment, she must be the front runner for a seamless transition, acknowledging her standing and ability as well as her communications skills.
The prime minister may blindside his colleagues and the electorate with a surprise choice: Alex Chalk, perhaps, now lord chancellor but formerly minister of state for defence procurement; or Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the former international development, international trade and transport secretary, who is now a junior FCDO minister and was at the MoD for a few months under Boris Johnson’s government. It would seem perverse to reach beyond the more obvious contenders without a good reason, but ministerial appointments are sometimes made on apparently opaque grounds.
Rishi Sunak has the summer to decide whom he wants to choose as the next secretary of state for defence. It is a big job and a tough one, and while there is a wide range of potential candidates, as there always is when a major post comes vacant, there are only two or three seriously plausible and qualified candidates. This is an occasion on which practical and strategic considerations, rather than quotidian domestic ones, should be at the forefront. Who can continue to work with President Zelensky and our allies to maintain support to Ukraine, and see the armed forces and the implementation of the new command paper through till next year’s general election? Let us hope the prime minister chooses wisely on those grounds.