Tom Tugendhat may have the most interesting merchandise in this Tory leadership contest (including fake tan, for reasons no-one has yet explained), but he is not, as things stand, the frontrunner. He is also the least experienced of the contenders in government terms, though he decided today to compensate for that in his on-stage interview in the conference hall by talking about being a soldier.
Just in case anyone there hadn’t picked up that Tugendhat has served his country, he made sure he slipped it into to any answer that was vaguely relevant, including that ‘I’m not going to hold against anybody their inexperience in combat or their inexperience in foreign affairs’. It was interesting that he also used his military career as the reason for not going into detail on whether he thought Israel had conducted its war in Gaza a proportionate manner, telling the interviewer Chris Hope that ‘as a solider’ (that phrase again), ‘I can tell you the decisions that are taken need to be looked at very carefully, but are not always reported exactly, not misreporting but they’re sometimes difficult to understand or difficult to explain’.
He was much more detailed on migration, saying that as security minister he had been working with other countries on intelligence sharing to tackle illegal migration, and that he would set a legal migration cap of 100,000 to:
focus the minds not just of businesses who are going to need to change the way that they hire and train, but also to focus the mind of government, because let’s be absolutely clear, the government itself has been employing many, many people who should have been trained at home.
He took aim at nameless secretaries of state who would always argue that their department was a special exception to a cap.
His arguments seemed to cheer the crowd, who were also taken with his point that nurses should be trained predominantly through apprenticeships rather than degrees, and who were even happier when he started attacking the begging emails from CCHQ asking for £20. These annoying emails seem to be a real theme of the leadership contest, with candidates almost using them as the motif for their wider distrust of their party’s headquarters.
Like his fellow candidates, he railed against the focus on Westminster and argued that the party needed to show it was thinking about the country again. He did flatter the members regularly, but he also challenged them: he refused to commit to restoring the winter fuel payment in full, for instance, despite the fact the Conservatives have been campaigning furiously against Labour’s change to this benefit.
He did receive cheers for arguing that it was his job ‘to reform the Conservative party, not become Reform’, and that trying to be more like the parties on either side of the Tories would be a mistake. ‘The enemy is trust,’ he argued. We have eroded trust in ourselves and we need to rebuild trust in the Conservative party. Because let’s be honest, people didn’t vote for that paddleboarder to become Prime Minister and they didn’t vote for Nigel either to become Prime Minister, they voted against us. People woke up in the morning and they wanted to get us out.’
What was striking about the tone of Tugendhat’s answers – and about the wider contest – is that he clearly now thinks that Labour is making such a mess of government that there is a chance the Tories could be back in power at the next election, if they make the right moves. It still says more about Labour than it does about a low voltage contest where the most exciting thing is free fake tan, but it is remarkable that a party so badly defeated so recently could be – quite reasonably – thinking that the wheels might come off Labour sooner than expected.
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