It’s the final night of Tory party conference and tempers are fraying. Three of the four leadership candidates have ended up weighing in on the 2019 sacking of the late Roger Scruton from his role as an unpaid adviser to the Department for Housing, after an interview he gave to the New Statesman (which was covered by The Spectator’s Douglas Murray at the time).
Kemi Badenoch said at a Spectator panel earlier today that ‘if you’re not prepared to fight for conservatives, to fight for your people, you have no business being involved in politics’. She explicitly mentioned the Roger Scruton case. Some might interpret that as a dig at Tugendhat, who spoke to BuzzFeed News in 2019 about the Scruton sacking, saying that ‘antisemitism sits alongside racism, anti-Islam, homophobia, and sexism as a cretinous and divisive belief that has no place in our public life and particularly not in government.
Mr S asked Tom Tugendhat what he thought of Badenoch’s comments, as the candidate was leaving a reception for LGBT+ Tories. He said:
I apologised to Roger at the time. I wrote to him and he very graciously accepted my apology. What I said was that I condemned racism. It was used and twisted to say it was a criticism of Roger. It wasn’t a criticism of Roger, but I made a mistake of allowing it to be understood that way, and that was a mistake.
Robert Jenrick, the frontrunner, has also said tonight that Scruton was ‘carelessly sacked’. The Scruton row has become a test of the candidates’ virility. But it’s only Tugendhat that it looks to be causing problems for.
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