There’s nothing Mr S likes more than a clash between two monumental ministerial egos. And they don’t come much bigger than Ben Wallace, the Forces’ Flashheart, and Johnny Mercer, the veteran thorn in No. 10’s backside. Both men serve in posts at the Ministry of Defence: Wallace as Secretary of State and Mercer in a junior role but still attending cabinet. But in recent weeks the pair have had something of a difference of opinion on defence spending.
First, there was a brief skirmish at the end of January when Mercer said that Wallace’s claims that Britain’s defence capabilities have been ‘hollowed out’ were ‘fundamentally not true’ and a ‘little bit disingenuous to the Prime Minister.’ And then yesterday Mercer told LBC that:
Ben is engaged in a lobbying effort for his department, as you would expect him to be. The facts are that when I came into politics, defence spending was around £38bn per year – it is just shy of £50bn a year now. It is obviously not credible to say that the money has been taken out of defence, but I will always argue for more money in defence. I have huge sympathy for that but I play everyone with a straight bat, and that goes across the board, I’m afraid.
Today Wallace hit back on the same channel, telling Nick Ferrari:
Johnny is a junior Minister. And Johnny luckily doesn’t have to run the budget. You know, I have a defence budget that has to deal, like all the other budgets, with inflation, with changes to threat, and I have to just deal with that. And that’s my job.
And in a pithy putdown he added that’ ‘I run a department of 224,000 people’ whereas Mercer has ‘got 12 people in the office.’ Brutal. Such comments haven’t gone down with, er, Mercer’s own wife Felicity, a woman never afraid to voice her views on his colleagues in parliament. She tweeted that it showed Wallace’s ‘disdain’ of Mercer and his veteran affairs’ brief.
Let’s hope some of that macho aggression is saved for the enemy, eh?
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