Ben Wallace on why veterans make good politicians

NEWS
Ben Wallace has been explaining why he thinks junior Armed Forces veterans can do well in politics.
Speaking on The Rest Is Politics podcast hosted by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, the former Conservative MP, who was Defence Secretary from 2019 to 2023 believes his time in uniform and leading troops is what equipped him with the skills necessary to govern.
When asked by the former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell "Do you think soldiers make good politicians?", Ben Wallace said he thought junior soldiers, such as captains and majors, do. "But," he added, "if you start going higher up [the ranks], these guys have been in 20 or 30 years and that is just quite a hard transition."
Mr Campbell spoke about his own brother's transition from the Armed Forces, saying that even after leaving the military he "never quite escaped, in his own mind, the fact of having been in the military and I found with a lot of military people, it utterly defines their life". He added that he is surprised how little some Members of Parliament with military experience talk about their service.
Mr Wallace explained why it might be difficult for some to transition back into civilian life. "It is their whole life, they've joined at 16... and for many, it took them away from very dysfunctional and difficult upbringings," he said. "It gave them, in their mind, everything. So of course it is going to be part of their life."
And to be good at politics, Mr Wallace believes: "You need to be interested in people and, if you're not, you shouldn't be a leader and you shouldn't be in politics. And that's what the Army teaches you, is that you lead not by saying 'I've got rank', because in the Scots Guards, if you did that, you'd get duffed up in the middle of the night."
Mr Wallace went on to explain that the military teaches you how to "read the people" and how to read the room and how that helped him correctly call Russia's invasion into Ukraine, when other senior officials still believed Vladimir Putin would not.