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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the spectators' daily politics podcast.

I'm James Yule and I'm joined today by James Forsyth and Katie Bulls

to discuss the current leadership crisis within the Conservative Party.

James, this morning we've seen an interesting sort of development from Ben Wallace

who seemed to suggest he was leaning towards backing Boris Johnson. Can you talk us through that?

So Ben Wallace's defence actually, very popular with Tory grassroots,

every time there is a Tory leadership contest, there is speculation about whether he will run or not.

Today he has come out and said he's not running for these leaning towards Boris Johnson on the basis

that Boris Johnson agrees with him on defence, has a mandate for the whole country within 2019

general election, but Ben Wallace says, you know, that the Proof-of-discovery investigation will be

a problem. And he also says that, you know, he's looking forward to hearing what what Rishi Sunak

says on defence. And I think what it's quite clear is that this is all part of the Ben Wallace

defence spending guarantee campaign that we saw kind of last weekend when there was talk,

but let's trust my abandon it. It became quite clear from that Ben Wallace was not happy about that.

And Ben Wallace is, he wants two things, he wants 3% by 2030.

He also wants what he calls the staging post, which is that he gets a kind of two and a half

percent by 2025, 2026. So I think that you see Ben Wallace who is a very cany politician

out today, basically looking like he's backing Boris Johnson, but not shutting the door and basically

saying is defence spending that I need to hear about. And of course, during the last leadership

...