Has Tom Tugendhat blown up his leadership campaign at launch?

We shouldn’t be surprised by Tom Tugendhat saying he is willing to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and then his subsequent failure to back up that claim in a wishy-washy radio interview. There is, after all, a long tradition in the Conservative party of ambitious centrist politicians pretending to believe in right-wing notions when positioning for the leadership.

Back in 2013, Philip Hammond had started to get talked about as the coming man and then popped up on the radio to say he would support leaving the European Union if our relationship with it could not be successfully reformed. Cue a further frisson for Hammond among the party grassroots.

In the event, David Cameron’s attempt to negotiate a new EU deal for Britain was a total flop but Hammond nonetheless became one of the least surprising and most zealous exponents for remaining in it when the referendum was held.

Of course, Brexit did not deliver the control of our borders that the British public was led to expect; and so it looks like our membership of another European institution is becoming the acid test of staunchness in the Tory leadership contest which has just begun. The European Convention on Human Rights and its supervisory court in Strasbourg have now been identified by millions of voters as surviving barriers against their wish for their country to regain sovereignty over its borders: de facto and de jure.

Two of the Tory leadership contenders – Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick – are crystal clear that Britain must escape the grip of these entities if it is to deal with its escalating and socially corrosive wave of illegal immigration. They happen also to have been the pair of ministers most immersed in the failed attempts of the last government to ‘stop the boats’. 

Just three weeks on from the general election and ECHR membership has already become a key topic for two even more prominent politicians. Prime Minister Keir Starmer says the UK will never leave it under his premiership, while Reform UK leader Nigel Farage used his maiden Commons speech to step up a campaign for our departure. Senior figures in each of their parties unanimously support those positions. So the voters know what they are getting.

The two Tories to have officially declared themselves leadership candidates so far are both from the left of the party. In his launch video on Wednesday, the former home secretary James Cleverly did not mention illegal immigration at all. Yet as recently as April 2023 he went on the record to disparage calls for ECHR departure, saying it would leave the UK ranked alongside Russia and Belarus as European nations rejecting the Convention. In October of that year, he was even more dismissive, telling a Tory conference fringe that the idea was only an issue ‘because journalists keep raising it’.

Afterwards Cleverly fell in behind Rishi Sunak when the then PM implied that he would be prepared to consider withdrawal. But that was simply a matter of cabinet collective responsibility and his heart was only in it to the same extent as Sunak’s, which is to say not at all.

Now Cleverly’s rival to be the main contender from the ‘One Nation’ wing, Tom Tugendhat, has outflanked him. Tugendhat has written a campaign launch article in the Daily Telegraph in which he declares that if institutions make it harder for Britain to control its borders, the UK will have to ‘exempt themselves from them’ or ‘leave their jurisdiction’.

Yet when BBC Today host Emma Barnett interviewed him this morning and asked him to give an unqualified statement that he was prepared to leave the ECHR, he repeatedly dodged doing so.

I’m diagnosing an acute case of Hammonditis here: the idea that this British-French dual national husband of a high-powered French lawyer will one day rival Farage as an ECHR leaver is simply not credible. Only Braverman-Jenrick levels of clarity, or to put it another way Starmer-Farage levels of clarity, will do here.

This leaves one major contender who has yet to show her hand. The bookies’ favourite Kemi Badenoch declared last autumn that the idea of leaving the ECHR was ‘definitely something that needs to be on the table’. Well yes, but once she has put it on her table what does she plan to do with it then?

She may well be able to get to the final two of this contest without making that clear – the vast majority of surviving Tory MPs are after all hardly gung-ho for ECHR departure. She may even be able to win the leadership on this basis if her final round opponent is not a clear advocate for withdrawal. 

But would she then be able to put Farage back in his box and re-establish an effective Tory monopoly over the right-of-centre vote? That seems very doubtful indeed.