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The leadership contender on his anger towards fellow MPs for tactical voting and his plot for the next great Conservative revolution
With the first Conservative leadership behind us and the next one just days away, Tom Tugendhat has not just fire in his belly, but an entire volcano. He is angry with fellow Tory MPs for “playing games” with their votes. He is angry about Labour and its trade union puppet masters. He is angry, in fact, with the entire political class, driven as it is with “ego and weakness”.
Tugendhat sees the contest to succeed Rishi Sunak as a battle for the very survival of the Conservative Party. Get it wrong, he says, and “this party doesn’t exist anymore”. More than that, he sees it as a battle to save the country from the “appalling” socialist government that is already unpicking the successes of the past 14 years and, what’s more, he is adamant that he is the only person who can do it.
“This is an existential fight for the future of the Conservative Party,” he exhorts. “And it’s a fight for who will govern Britain in 2029. Will it be Keir Starmer or will it be me, because I am the only Conservative running in this contest who polls consistently better than Keir Starmer and has done for three years.” He says polling also shows he is the only one who wins votes from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Reform UK.
It is an impressive pitch, but one which, so far, seems to have passed his colleagues by. In last Wednesday’s highly revealing first round of voting among Tory MPs, Tugendhat came fourth behind Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch and James Cleverly. More alarmingly for him, he got just one more vote than Mel Stride, the current back marker, meaning he is in a genuine fight to stay in the race when the next vote happens this coming Tuesday.
Tory leadership race
Before nominations opened, many Wesminster watchers believed the leadership race would come down to a face-off between Tugendhat, the champion of One Nation conservatism, and Badenoch, the feisty poster girl of the Right. Now there is much talk of a Jenrick-Cleverly head-to-head.
It is obvious that the result still stings when we meet in Tugendhat’s office in Parliament, and constant refills of black tea from a teapot on his side table do nothing to calm him. Some of his answers to my questions last for around five minutes, not because he is rambling, but because ideas, indignation and passion come tumbling out at speed, propelled by the frustration he feels about his own – and the Tory Party’s – current position.
We begin at the most obvious starting point, the vote itself, and why his own showing was perhaps more modest than predicted.
“It’s a very flat race,” he says, “just look at the numbers, they’re incredibly tight.” He also thinks they were a result of tactical voting, which he clearly hates.
“People voting in the first round quite understandably did so out of friendship and loyalty,” he says. “But I think people have realised already that this is a very serious decision. What kind of Conservative Party are we going to have in a few years’ time? One that actually reaches across the country, that wins votes in Scotland, in Wales, or are we going to be a single-issue pressure group that races for Reform voters, arguing over 15 per cent of the [national] vote? Because if we want to do that, fine, and this party doesn’t exist anymore.”
It sounds a lot like a dig at Robert Jenrick, currently leading the race, who has said he will leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) if he becomes leader – something none of the other candidates have committed to.
Some MPs think candidates “loaned” votes to opponents to skew the first-round result, possibly in order to make sure Dame Priti Patel got knocked out, or to bolster the chances of someone they would rather stand against in the final two. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time.
“There’s a lot of people who were told one thing before the last vote and thought they were keeping people in,” Tugendhat says, “and then realised with the result that that’s not what they were doing, and they felt played. This isn’t a game.”
MPs will whittle the field down to two candidates, who will then fight for the votes of party members, who are given the final say.
Tugendhat warns his fellow MPs that if they do not “respect the members” by giving them the two best candidates to choose from, they will be guilty of betraying the members.
Is he thinking of anyone in particular?
“Priti is one of the most popular members of Parliament with the membership,” he says. “I’ll leave that there.”
Cynics might suggest that Tugendhat is lionising Dame Priti in order to appeal to her supporters, whose 14 votes are now being fought over by the remaining five candidates in a sort of electoral cannibalism. It may be working, too: Tugendhat is “delighted” to tell me that some of her supporters have already switched allegiance to him, and “not just from Priti but from others as well. I’m not going to get into numbers but its supporters plural from Priti and plural from others as well.”
It sounds as though he has nothing to worry about in the next vote, though of course there could be more game-playing if other contenders want to elbow him out of the picture and keep Mel Stride in the mix.
“If people see Westminster and the Conservative Party playing petty political games in order to advance a minor career,” says Tugendhat, “then guess what, they’re going to go for somebody who’s actually going to serve them, who is going to act in their interests. We need to have a leader who is able to lead us away from this appalling socialist government.”
With a grim look on his face, Tugendhat warns his fellow MPs not to make the assumption that the party has already reached rock bottom or the only way is up, regardless of leader.
“The 121 MPs we have got is not the bottom,” he says. “The bottom is zero.”
Tugendhat, 51, has been the MP for Tonbridge and Malling (now just called Tonbridge) since 2015, and kept his seat in this year’s general election with a healthy majority of 11,166.
He made his name as chairman of the foreign affairs select committee, then stood in the Tory leadership race in 2022, coming fifth before backing Liz Truss. Truss then made him minister of state for security, a job he kept under Rishi Sunak, and he now has the same brief on the shadow front bench.
He gave up alcohol when he was made security minister because: “I was getting phone calls at 3am and you want to be absolutely sure you’re clear-headed,” and has no intention of reversing that for the foreseeable future as: “This is a serious job. I need to be entirely focused on what I’m doing.”
The son of a High Court judge, Tugendhat was educated at the private St Paul’s School in London (George Osborne was two years above him) then studied theology at Bristol and Islamic studies at Cambridge, which involved travelling to Yemen to learn Arabic.
His first career was in journalism, but he also joined the Territorial Army (now the Army Reserve) which quickly became a full time job after he was mobilised to take part in the Iraq War. His military service taught him much about leadership.
“I think what military leadership does is it offers the ability to bring order out of chaos, that moment where you get a real clarity in a moment of chaos and in the United Kingdom at the moment we are seeing far too much chaos and not enough clarity, and that’s why I want to be leader,” he says.
He vividly recalls the first firefight he got into, in 2003. As a reservist, he was working at Bloomberg News in Queen Victoria Street, London, when he was mobilised to Iraq, and soon after arriving he was being shot at.
“I was very slightly injured, and it was a very clarifying moment for me. Seeing the way that others respond and seeing the way that we were able to respond as a team showed me what really matters, and what really matters in life is the understanding of who you are there to serve, what you are there to achieve.”
Tugendhat was attached to the Royal Marines and the Intelligence Corps at various times, and also worked for the Foreign Office in Afghanistan helping set up the government in Helmand. I had read that he sometimes wears a Special Boat Service tie and ask him if that’s true.
“I am a member of a lot of associations,” he says.
Does that mean he served with the SBS?
“I’m very honoured to be a member of the association,” he says cryptically, which is a lot different from saying no.
His office offers no obvious clues to his military background, other than its spartan tidiness. There is a 16kg kettlebell weight by his desk “for times of frustration” when a quick workout can clear his mind. A child’s handprint painting stands on a shelf, and on the wall is an old portrait print of Thomas More that used to hang in his father’s office, nabbed by the MP because “I am called Thomas and we are Catholics”.
The Tugendhats were once one of the great Jewish families of central Europe. Tugendhat’s distant cousins, Fritz and Greta, had a modernist mansion, the Villa Tugendhat, built for them in Brno but fled during the Holocaust. In 1992 the agreement to divide Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia was signed at the Villa Tugendhat, which is now a museum.
Tom Tugendhat’s grandfather was from Vienna, and fled to Britain during the rise of the Nazi party, converting to Catholicism when he married. Others were not so lucky.
“There is a reason you haven’t heard of many Tugendhats in this country, because my family were murdered in the Holocaust,” the MP says. “This country is phenomenal, it has offered salvation and protection to many. It kept us safe and I am very, very proud to serve it.”
Part of the reason Tugendhat – a hawk on China, Russia and Iran – is so engaged with foreign policy is his Jewish heritage, which has taught him that: “You need to be absolutely serious about the threats that face us because the Devil hasn’t gone away, he may be in abeyance but if you live in Bucha or Irpin [near Kyiv] these days you know that the Devil exists.”
Tugendhat’s worldview has also been shaped in part by his French mother, Blandine, and his French wife, Anissia, a lawyer. They have brought up their 10-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter to be trilingual; as well as speaking English and French they speak some Russian, as his wife’s late mother was of Russian origin.
As a family they are huge fans of Strictly Come Dancing. I ask Tugendhat if he is running in the leadership race just to get on Strictly, which draws a bark of laughter like a pressure valve being released.
“There are many things I would like to do after politics, but not Strictly. Let me tell you, nobody wants to see me dance!”
He insists he and his wife don’t discuss the merits and demerits of EU membership at home, but visits to the in-laws in France and discussions with his counterparts abroad do give him an insight into what other countries think about issues that are also hot topics at home, including membership of the ECHR.
“I can tell you for an absolute fact that many other countries have the same issues with the ECHR that we do, and even more so, because it is based on British law,” he says. “We can work together on the ECHR.”
Tugendhat, who has previously said he would not take Britain out of the ECHR, was accused of a sop to the right when he recently said he would be prepared to leave in certain circumstances, and insists this does not amount to a change of position.
“Do I want to leave? No. I want to reform,” he says. “I can’t promise success and that is why I’m saying I am prepared to leave.
The next four years, he says, can be used to plot the next great Conservative revolution, which will in part mean finding ways to reset from a low-pay, high-migration economy to a high-pay, low-migration economy.
He has said in recent speeches that the Tories gave the economy the illusion of growth by importing cheap foreign labour, and says that: “You can stand on the white cliffs of Dover and shout at migrants all you like, but the only way to change migrant numbers is to change the economy.”
He would impose a cap of 100,000 on annual net legal migration “to be absolutely clear what we are trying to achieve”, and says the reason previous governments have failed to bring down migration is because they have not been prepared to make the tough structural changes to benefits and to the economy that are needed.
He says: “This four years if we use it properly is going to set us up for a period of 10-15 years of real transformation when we go into Number 10 in 2029 and we have an education policy that reinforces the progress we’ve made, not reverses it like we’re seeing with Labour now, greater productivity in the health service and public service, not just paying off union paymasters.
“We are phenomenally well set for future growth but the country cannot afford Labour… what Labour is setting out is a vision of despair.”
His recipe for growth involves deregulation, as well as lower taxes, though he can’t say which, if any, taxes he would abolish because it would depend on the state of the economy at the time.
He would increase defence spending to three per cent of GDP and would “probably” spend more if it was accompanied by reforms.
He would also like to have seen HS2 go not only to Manchester but all the way to Glasgow, but says overregulation means Britain is spending multiples of what France and other countries spend on rail construction and that is what has killed the project.
Tugendhat bristles once again when he returns to the subject of MPs’ behaviour.
“What annoys me so much about politics is it’s marked by a lack of courage, lack of integrity, lack of service, it’s ego and weakness and it can be very dispiriting when this country could be phenomenal under the right leadership,” he says.
“This party is the right vehicle for hope and opportunity. If we squander this it’s a betrayal of the British people. We have a real chance, the extraordinary luxury of four years of thinking time and a socialist and terrible opposition that is eminently beatable, and a real opportunity to inspire people back into conservatism if we set out a leadership, a vision that this country can follow.
“It’s about my kids’ future, it’s about our security in an incredibly troubled world. I am absolutely serious about this. That’s why I’m not drinking, that’s why I’m not playing games, because this really matters.”
Tory leadership race