If he became Prime Minister, he would “go to war with at least three different countries at once”. So Kenneth Clarke warned off-camera about Michael Gove during the latter’s 2016 leadership bid. I find it a little ironic, since I have heard a similar jibe occasionally aired about Tom Tugendhat – the very candidate that Clarke is minded to back in the current contest.
As a paid-up Tory member, Clarke will have as many votes in this contest as any of us not stoic enough to be one of our 121 MPs. Whilst Tugendhat will look in vain for advice on winning leadership elections from Clarke’s direction, the support of the ex-Chancellor, Justice Secretary, and Deputy Chairman of British American Tobacco should still be a boon to any candidate.
When Clarke describes Tugendhat as “having an element of charisma”, it sounds like no bad thing. Nor is his suggestion that Tugendhat has “sensible, intelligent views based on genuine knowledge of what he’s talking about”. Who would want a leader that’s mad, thick, and clueless about their aims?
But the backing of the Aslan of the Tory left feeds into a claim often made about Tugendhat: that he is a centrist, a wet, a leftie. That is not, in itself, a bad thing. We are the party of Margaret Thatcher and Harold Macmillan, a broad church, with many denominations, however uncomfortable. It’s good to have a debate on the state’s size and the reach of social liberalism.
Nonetheless, the received wisdom is that the candidate in the final two of a leadership election perceived as being more on the right goes on to win. Iain Duncan Smith against Clarke. Boris Johnson against Jeremy Hunt. Liz Truss against Rishi Sunak. Whether one would define each of those victors as right-wing is debatable. It’s all vibes: tax cuts and waving the Eurosceptic bloody shirt.
The great exception to this rule was David Cameron’s victory in 2005. His eloquence triumphed over David Davis’s perceived sluggishness, enabled by enough media bandwagoning to make Kamala Harris blush. Even then, Cameron showed a little leg to the party’s right to earn the right to be heard, promising to pull the Tories out of the centre-right grouping in the European Parliament.
By playing footsie around the ECHR, Tugendhat seems to be copying Cameron’s work. Like the former Foreign Secretary, he seems to be the sort of earnest public-school boy who has governed this country since the Norman Conquest and assumes they will do so for many centuries more. A product of, and devotee to, the ‘Sensible Chaps’ theory of politics. See also: Stewart, Rory.
The son of a High Court judge, nephew of a Vice-President of the European Commission, educated at St Paul’s, Bristol, and Cambridge, and then packed off to the Intelligence Corps and Foreign Office, Tugendhat has not done badly out of the ancien régime. He thinks that Boris Johnson was a rogue and that King Charles Street needs more power. Is he part of the Ascendancy?
From his vantage point as Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Tugendhat emerged as a persistent critic of Johnson’s government. Filling a Stewart-shaped hole, he used select committee hearings to demonstrate his disdain for Johnson’s approach, whilst rebelling on aid and trade. Unsurprisingly, a few Johnson critics like Damien Green consistently rallied to his flag.
The assumptions about Tugendhat add up. Of course, he’s the centre-left candidate in this race. Of course, he’ll have the backing of the One Nation Group at the parliamentary stage. Of course, if he makes it to the final two, he will be outflanked by someone more right-wing. Robert Jenrick can look perfectly sensible, and when he says he wants to leave the ECHR, he has form.
But how do the varous tenets of Tugendhat-ism hold up on further inspection? Just as he is not really a patrilineal descendent of William the Conqueror but the grandson of an Austrian Jewish émigré, so too is his leftie labelling a fog obscuring the nuances of his candidacy.
Just as Tugendhat paired Green’s recent re-endorsement with Steve Baker, the self-styled Benjamin L. Willard of free-market Euroscepticism, so too did he match his criticisms of Johnson with judicious votes against stricter Covid measures. His support has never come exclusively from Remainers or the One Nation group, taking in Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Jake Berry in 2022.
Once he dropped out, Tugendhat backed Truss. Having promised to reverse Sunak’s rise in national insurance and laid out a ten-point plan for growth, the pair’s pitches had obvious similarities. Above all, they crossed over on the issue that matters most to him: foreign policy.
“From China to Ukraine,” he wrote, “the world around us is getting more challenging”. As the then-Foreign Secretary, Truss had a “huge advantage” in not only making “our voice count” on the world stage but in impressing one of the last of the once noble breed of Tory international affairs specialists. Having been sanctioned by Beijing, Tugendhat was happy to embrace her hawkishness.
The truth is not that Tugendhat has no interest in domestic policy. But it is not what got him into politics, where his interests lie, or what he is good at. He made a name for himself as a foreign policy specialist as it was the easiest way to play to his strengths on his scramble up the greasy pole.
As leader, one suspects much on the home front would be left to his Shadow team. Keep an eye on Nick Timothy and Patrick Spencer. On one occasion when he surveyed the domestic vista – a 2018 speech to the Social Market Foundation – he struck the communitarian capitalist notes one would expect from the age of Theresa May, early UnHerd, and Paul Collier’s The Future of Capitalism.
He spoke positively about companies enabling their employees to take a stake, about Lisa Nandy’s work on revitalising high streets, and about the joys of Greggs. “Community Conservatism is essential to working together in a changing world”, he signed off, nodding to his time in Iraq.
Switching to calling for the “true Conservative principles of low tax, a lean state, and bold supply supply-side reform” in 2022 does not mean that Tugendhat has abandoned his earlier views, only that he is sufficiently self-aware to retune his instincts to suit the current mood music. Hence his current lament about tax, party unity, an undersupply of homes, and an oversupply of migrants.
In his year and a half as Security Minister, Tugendhat largely kept his head down. With TikTok to investigate and Palestine protests to police, he had enough to keep himself busy. It’s not surprising that his major intervention so far has been to speak in response to the riots – a subject on which, if not wholly original, he is eloquent, clear-headed, and a damn sight more proactive than Rishi Sunak.
Will this be enough to get Tugendhat across the line? Who can say? Even if some polls suggest he is the most popular candidate with the public, our most recent survey had him going backward amongst members. The One Nation whiff is hard to shift. Other campaigns had sturdier launches.
Even if Tugendhat does not become our next leader, his assets are obvious. Yes, jokes will be made at the expense of his hawkishness. But any future leader would be lucky to have him as a Shadow Defence, Home, or Foreign Secretary. The leftie allegations should be no cause for concern. If he can swap Collier for Truss, he can trim himself to the party’s present needs.
In the meantime, trying to define just what constitutes a “leftie” in Tory terms shows the shallowness of encapsulating one’s understanding of the political spectrum based on where members sat in France’s revolutionary assembly over two centuries ago. Inadequate language always leads to inadequate thinking.