John Glen has been MP for Salisbury since 2010 and spent four and a half years as the City Minister, the longest anyone has held the post, before reaching the cabinet and then, with the 2024 defeat, falling most of the way back down again. He is now parliamentary aide to the leader of the opposition, which is a long way from where he was.

As Economic Secretary to the Treasury from 2018 he held the brief for banking and financial services through the entire Brexit transition, a period when the City needed ministerial continuity and got it from him. He led the reform of Solvency II insurance rules and laid the groundwork for the post Brexit financial services framework, unglamorous work that he understood better than almost anyone in government. He reached the cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury and then Paymaster General. Within his specialism he was as serious and capable a minister as the Treasury had.

He was also the member for Salisbury when the Russian state tried to murder Sergei Skripal with a nerve agent in 2018, weeks into his Treasury job, and he handled the local crisis and its long aftermath with evident care, later telling the Commons that Putin was culpable. On the things that mattered most to his constituency, he was present and serious.

For all the years at the Treasury, there is no single reform the public associates with him, the fate of the competent specialist who is known inside the building and nowhere else. His social record also sits awkwardly with the modern image of his party. He voted against same sex marriage in 2013, and in 2012 he refused to cut ties with a Christian charity that had helped sponsor a conference promoting so called therapy for same sex attraction, defending it as the work of one lecturer while a petition of thousands called on him to act.

In 2024 he held Salisbury with a majority of 3,807, Labour in second, his vote share down to a third. Badenoch did not keep him in the shadow cabinet, and after months on the backbenches he became her parliamentary private secretary in 2025, a junior aide's role for a man who used to run the City brief.

Glen is diligent, expert and, on the defining ordeal of his constituency, a credit to it. He is also the embodiment of the technocrat's ceiling, a minister fluent in the machinery of finance who never translated it into anything the country noticed, and whose career has settled, after all the offices, into carrying the leader's papers. The competence is not in doubt. The mark he leaves is faint.