Move aside, Boris

When Boris Johnson compared Theresa May’s Brexit plan to wrapping a suicide vest around Britain’s constitution, the harshest response came from a fellow Tory MP, Tom Tugendhat, who tweeted: ‘A suicide bomber murdered many in the courtyard of my office in Helmand. The carnage was disgusting, limbs and flesh hanging from trees and bushes. Brave men who stopped him killing me and others died in horrific pain. Some need to grow up. Comparing the PM to that isn’t funny.’ The response was a reminder of how high feelings are running in the Conservative party — and that Tugendhat is not one to pull his punches.

A lieutenant colonel by the age of 36, he entered parliament in 2015 and barely two years later was elected chairman of the prestigious Foreign Affairs Select Committee. In the process, he ousted Tory grandee Crispin Blunt and quickly established himself as one of the most ambitious, as well as one of the brightest, Conservative MPs.

‘When I think about why I got into politics, it was to guard the interests of this country,’ he says when we meet in his Commons office. ‘The opportunity presented itself and I took it.’ Few new MPs would have got away with it, but having done active service in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a spell advising the former head of the military Sir David Richards, Tugendhat had arrived with credentials that longer-serving MPs struggled to match. Here, as in the US, recent wars have produced a generation of young veterans entering politics — of whom Tugendhat is the most prominent British example.

Tugendhat believes his party is about to undergo quite a change and that, after Brexit, ‘It’s time for a generational shift.’ The last generation, he says, was that of David Cameron and his allies.