Tom Tugendhat’s pitch: I’m a proper conservative, honest guv

Tom Tugendhat finally launched his leadership campaign today with a big speech in Whitehall – the third he has made in as many weeks. After previous efforts on the riots and public sector reform, today was Tugendhat’s last chance to hammer home his main message before the first ballot of MPs tomorrow: I’m a proper conservative, honest. To this end, he offered more red meat than a butchers, pledging (again) to potentially leave the ECHR, increase defence spending to three per cent of GDP and commit the party to 100,000 net legal migrants if he wins. 

Indeed much of the speech focused on migration: a key issue in a contest where four of the six contenders served in the Home Office. He bemoaned how post-Brexit, ‘we swapped young Europeans for older families around the world’, insisting that if elected ‘We need to rethink our entire economy’ to make it less dependant on migration. High-levels of low-skilled migration ‘is a choice’, he insisted, to keep ‘maintaining the illusion of growth’. Under his leadership, he promised a decade of sweeping change: ‘It is going to take us an entire term of government and maybe two to bring about the Conservative revolution that this country truly needs.’ If elected, he joked, at least it would make the leaders of Tehran, Beijing and Moscow unhappy – given all three have slapped sanctions on him.

There was also plenty of rhetoric – the only real weapon open to a party in opposition. He claimed the Prime Minister had ‘abandoned the country to the hard-left’ with Labour’s plans to put VAT on private school fees representing ‘one of the most vindictive policies to come out of a British government in generations’. Keir Starmer’s removal of Margaret Thatcher’s portrait was more than a ‘cheap political stunt, beneath the dignity of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’ but rather a symbolic ‘rejection of the reforms that she brought in’. As for today’s decision to suspend some arms sales to Israel, it represented ‘a remarkable decision’. ‘If we are not willing to stand by our allies when they are literally discovering the bodies of their murdered citizens, what is the point of an alliance?’

After the speech – received to rapturous applause in the Royal Horseguards Hotel – came half-a-dozen questions from the press. Tugendhat performed well here, mixing good-chap humour with passion and indignation to defuse various lines of inquiry. Asked about his colleague Alicia Kearns’ call for an arms embargo on Israel in April, he responded with a swerve worthy of a call-up to Twickenham, dodging the question entirely and pouring scorn on David Lammy. Pressed on his service in Rishi Sunak’s government – a government which produced the worst defeat in Conservative history – he pleaded rectitude, saying that as security mnister ‘I served in silence. My job was to keep the King’s secrets and to keep the country safe.’

It was a line that went down well in the room – but others outside it might think differently. ‘A lot of chinos’ was how one member summed up the event. From the speech to the atmosphere and grand setting, this launch was indisputably Tugendhat – and very obviously Tory. The question is whether it is the kind of leadership that his colleagues want. Tomorrow afternoon, we shall get our first indication.