Before entering the Commons, Jopp was a businessman and former colonel in the British Army (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)
Lincoln Jopp knows what it means to be at the centre of the action. His courage under fire in Sierra Leone won him the Military Cross and his leadership skills were again tested commanding troops in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. The son of a racing driver – whose mother was an early presenter of Top Gear and whose wife co-founded the first Military Wives choir – does not seek a quiet life.
And he was marked out as one to watch from the moment he arrived in Westminster in July as a newly elected Conservative MP.
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With the Tories facing the challenge of rebuilding after turmoil and defeat, leader Kemi Badenoch will need people by her side who are good in a crisis.
Mr Jopp looks destined to play a key role in this recovery mission.
At Sandhurst he was one of the “blade runners” – the ambitious officers-in-training competing for the coveted Sword of Honour presented to the best cadet.
He won this fabled trophy but his true turning point took place a few years earlier, when he was a St Paul’s schoolboy familiar with being told off.
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A teacher called his name and he wondered what he had done to get in trouble this time. “Jopp,” the teacher said. “We’ve been discussing you in the common room.
“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.”
The teenager thought this over for around 12 hours with, he admits, all the “arrogance of youth”. He remembers: “I came back into school the next day and said the two purest outlets for leadership were politics and the Armed Forces. I chose the Army, and I choose politics now.”
His father, racing driver Peter Jopp, and mother, motoring journalist Judith Jackson, did not have “any military bent”, but they backed his decision to join the forces.
He relished life as a soldier, finding
himself competing against one of Britain’s modern sporting legends in the 110m hurdles at the Army athletics championships.
His rival in the adjacent lane was a staff sergeant by the name of Kriss Akabusi.
“He was peeling off his Seoul Olympics warm-up top,” Mr Jopp recalls.
“He turned round, gave me one of those 10,000 watt smiles of his, and just said, ‘I’ll see you at the end, sir.’”
This anecdote is typical of Mr Jopp’s self-deprecating humour.
When asked about the events that led to him winning the Military Cross, he says: “Like most medal-winning opportunities it comes about because of a cock-up.”
Mr Jopp was in Sierra Leone assisting the Foreign Office in 1997 when the African state was plunged into chaos by a coup. He helped arrange thousands of evacuations but their base at the Hotel Mammy Yoko came under fierce attack from rebel soldiers.
He was “blown up and then shot”. His advice to anyone in a similar situation is to “always try and find an ex-SAS mercenary in your immediate environment who is a dab hand with rocket-propelled grenades and the general-purpose machine gun.
“That’s what I was lucky enough to have, a guy called Will Scully.”
Scully won the Queen’s Gallantry Medal for his efforts. Mr Jopp recovered from his injuries and had shrapnel removed in subsequent operations. But the thought of retirement into civilian life did not cross his mind.
“I very much wanted to keep going and thought I still had something to offer,” he says. His wife Caroline shares his passion for making things happen. He says their “first date was delivering meals on wheels on Christmas Day”. They have three children and his parenting strategy is to “surround them with love and information and encourage them to take decisions and take personal accountability”.
When they were based at Catterick Garrison in North Yorkshire, Mrs Jopp and her friend Nicky Clarke came up with the idea for the choir which birthed the Military Wives phenomenon. Today around 1,800 women in scores of choirs across the
military community support one another through a shared love of song.
The success of the choirs inspired a 2019 film with Kristin Scott Thomas playing a character loosely based on Mrs Jopp.
Although he praises Military Wives as a “great movie” he says: “When you make a film you take many, many characters and you blend them into one. I can happily report that the character played by Kristin Scott Thomas is nothing like my wife.”
He adds: “The thought that Caroline would ever drive up to someone on a
barrack gate and say, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ – that’s 180 degrees away from my wife as anyone will tell you.”
While the popularity of the choir was
taking off, the Scots Guards were at the forefront of highly complex counter insurgency efforts in Afghanistan.
This involved teaming up with locals, leaving the base far behind – and being exposed to “incredible danger”.
Explaining the thinking behind this approach, Mr Jopp says: “If you are born and brought up in Easterhouse or Dundee, your ability to identify the absence of the normal or the presence of the abnormal in a rural setting in the Helmand river valley is pretty limited.
“What you do is partner with the Afghan forces, in our case the Afghan police, because the hairs on the back of their necks stand up long before yours do.”
Lives were lost on this “tough tour” and he admits he was “deeply upset” when the United States pulled the plug on Nato’s presence in Afghanistan.
He describes the controversial decision as a “moonlight flit” – and fears it will have “incredibly damaging” consequences.
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“It sends a message that you haven’t got stickability,” he says.
He helped one of his Afghan translators come to the UK as the country returned to Taliban control. And now he hopes another foreign policy disaster can be avoided much closer to home. “We mustn’t lose in Ukraine,” he says, arguing it is “essential” we continue to give the invaded country “all the support we can”.
On the endgame for the conflict, he says: “I’d like to see Putin withdraw from the whole place including Crimea. Beyond that, it’s for the Ukrainians to decide.”
Right now, he is learning the ropes as one of the 121 Conservative MPs who made it into the Commons in the summer election.
He made the leap into frontline politics because “you can only do so much screaming at your radio and your television”.
After he left the Army in 2013 he entered the world of business and was chief operating officer at the Pension SuperFund until 2023. But his friends had long predicted he would become an MP and he now represents former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s old Surrey seat of Spelthorne.
“If you’re someone with a background like mine, who believes in personal accountability and strong leadership and good behaviour, there’s only one thing you can do,” he says.
He scents the possibility that Sir Keir Starmer’s government could be out after one term – and is appalled at the consequences in his constituency of Labour axing universal winter fuel payments.
“I’ve got 10,975 people who have lost their winter fuel payment,” he says.
“I can quite see how the Government wanted to take the winter fuel payment from millionaire pensioners – I’ve got no problem with that whatsoever.
“The trouble is they just did their maths wrong and they’re now taking it from some really not-well-off people in my constituency. I think that’s dreadful.”
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This former colonel bats away a question about whether he would ever aspire to lead the party, saying: “My absolute focus is solely on becoming really good at what the people of Spelthorne sent me here to do.”
His political story may be just beginning.
But his life so far suggests it will be an adventure and a half.