Tory MP Lincoln Jopp: I Am Up For The Fight With Nigel Farage
6 min read
Lincoln Jopp is the latest Conservative MP whose journey to Westminster was via the Scots Guards. The former soldier believes his bruised party has two years to make itself a serious electoral force again, and warns Nigel Farage that he is "up for the fight".
“‘Ah Jopp, we’ve been discussing you in the common room’," says Lincoln Jopp, the Tory MP for Spelthorne, impersonating his old school master. “‘We think you’ve got a spark of leadership and you need to think about how you’re going to use that in your life.'
“With all the arrogance of youth, I gave it all of 12 hours thought and came back into school the next day and said: ‘The two purest outlets for leadership are either politics or the armed forces.’ I chose the army then, and I choose politics now.”
Jopp, 56, has entered Parliament at a critical time for his party. Some say existential.
“I expected it to be really bad,” he says, reflecting on last week's local elections where the Conservatives lost nearly 700 council seats.
“We’ve got a pretty poor reputation of either not being able to do the things we wanted to do, or doing things that weren't particularly Conservative...
“We've got our work cut out getting our house in order.”
Most of the damage to the Tory vote was done by Reform UK, with Nigel Farage's right-wing party essentially replacing the Conservatives altogether in councils like Kent.
The result prompted claims that Reform could dislodge the Tories as the leading party on the right, turning British politics on its head. Jopp, however, says he will not go down without a fight.
“Reform can promise trebles all round – and, whilst I quite like the idea of trebles all round, I'm up for the fight if it turns out we need to have one."
He later adds: “Ask anyone in my family, I'm not overly competitive – I just have to win everything.”
According to Jopp, in two years Kemi Badenoch's party must be seen by voters as a serious alternative. “By word of mouth, people should be saying to one another, you really ought to have another look at the Conservatives. They've got some fantastic people, they've got some really good ideas, policies, and they're totally unified.”
This, the former colonel adds, must include becoming the party of defence once again.
“We must reclaim what was always strong Conservative ground, which was strong on defence, national security, crime and the country of patriotism, and entrepreneurship.”
A former Scots Guards officer, his regiment has many prominent Conservative MPs among its alumni, including former deputy prime minister Willie Whitelaw, ex-party leader Iain Duncan Smith and former defence secretary Ben Wallace. “My regiment's prominence in politics is absolutely extraordinary,” says Jopp.
“I was just a tiny bit senior to Ben [Wallace], and so I was his adjutant for a short time – he was a young officer – but essentially we were both young officers. We were in Belfast together in ‘92.”
Another ex-army officer turned MP – and one of Jopp’s oldest political friends – is Tom Tugendhat, the former security minister. The pair first met 37 years ago at St Paul’s School for Boys when Jopp gave an induction to new students. “We worked out that one of these snot dribbling down his nose, new boys, was Tom”, he says.
Jopp went on to serve in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is deeply critical of the government’s plans to repeal the Legacy Act, the law protecting Northern Ireland veterans from prosecution. “This historic litigation over Northern Ireland is really raising people's ire and rightly so… the government is mistaken,” he insists.
In 1997, he was awarded the Military Cross for gallant services in Sierra Leone while working for the Foreign Office. “There was a coup d'etat. We evacuated about 3,000 people and got them out”, he says.
“The place that we had been running the evacuations out of over a series of days came under attack. We had about 900 civilians in there. It was me and an ex-SAS mercenary called Will Scully. When people ask: ‘What advice have you got if you're ever in combat’, I say, have an ex-SAS man next to you because they’re bloody useful.”
Jopp is one of the first MPs, along with current veterans minister Al Carns, to be awarded the Military Cross since Whitelaw. “Like number nine buses, you wait 30 years and then two come along at once,” he says.
“I got blown up and shot. Then we had to escape, but we lived... The perfect preparation for PMQs.”
It was his time in the army, Jopp says, that made him a “natural Conservative”.
Jopp admits that foreign affairs is not his preferred brief, explaining that the responsibility means he can't be as animated as he likes in the Commons.
“I'm finding it a bit frustrating," he says.
"Clearly, the whips have put us in things we're interested in, but the custom is, if you're sitting behind the shadow minister, you don't bob and intervene and have your voice heard in the Chamber.”
“What they could have done is given me something I'm keen to learn about – health, say."
With a peace deal in Ukraine still seemingly a long way off, Jopp says the UK must remain steadfast behind president Volodymyr Zelensky's efforts to defeat Russia, saying the UK and its allies are right to "have kept our boxing gloves on.”
He states that defence spending must go further than Keir Starmer's current plan to raise it to 2.5 per cent of GDP.
“It was a bit daft because even the dogs in the streets knew we had to go up to 2.5 per cent as a minimum,” he says.
Should it be double figures? “No, not yet. But it's worth noting that Russia is at 43 per cent, and we're arguing over 2.36 to 2.5 and having a defence review to buy political cover to get that. That seems like the wrong conversation, which has taken too long anyway.”
The Conservatives have started working on policy to take into the next general election, and one of the ideas being considered is reviving mandatory National Service – a policy included in former prime minister Rishi Sunak's 2025 election manifesto.
“I sat bolt upright in bed and said: ‘We're going to do what!?’” says Jopp, remembering when the policy was announced last year.
“I'm not advocating national service, but the army is a massive engine for social mobility. It takes people from some pretty tough backgrounds and trains them, and they end up doing the most extraordinary things."
