Tory leadership hopeful Tom Tugendhat looks the part but would he be ready?

Good morning. In all the messages I get about the Conservative leadership race, one candidate receives positive comments more than any other: Tom Tugendhat, the shadow security minister. Among Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs, Tugendhat — along with James Cleverly — is the candidate thought to pose the biggest challenge to them at the next election.

So in our summer series in which we make the case for and against each contender, from the perspective of the Conservative party’s self-interest, the “for” is, hopefully, pretty easy. Our previous entries on Mel Stride and Priti Patel can be read here.

In favour

The case for Tom Tugendhat is that whenever the viewing public outside the Conservative party have taken a look at him, they have liked what they have seen. Having only ever held the security role in government, and having been a widely respected select committee chair, he would come into the role free of political baggage. For this reason, he would be the hardest of all six candidates for Labour and the Liberal Democrats to attack.

And that he appeals to former Lib Dem voters is a big asset. In July 2024, the Lib Dems won 60 seats from the Conservatives in England and Wales. When the Lib Dems win a seat at a general election, it usually takes an awful lot to get them back out again. It typically requires some kind of shock political event, like, say, the party going into coalition for the first time, or Jeremy Thorpe shooting a dog, to dislodge incumbent Liberal Democrats.

The other points of opportunity for opposing political parties come when the incumbent MP steps down, and occasionally, Lib Dem seats have been lost when the sitting MP neglects or is felt to have neglected the seat. The new parliament hasn’t been around very long, but my impression from the Lib Dem MPs I have met thus far is that it is a relatively young parliamentary party composed of a very strong intake. So it is going to take something exceptional to get these MPs out, and until that happens, the Conservative party is going to struggle to win majorities.

To put it into perspective: the Conservatives could win back every single one of the seats they lost to Labour in 2024 but they are not going to win a decent majority if they can’t make inroads into that bloc of seats the Lib Dems won last time. And they could still lose more ground to the Lib Dems next time, not least because in several seats where the party ran the Conservatives close, the incumbent MP will be approaching retirement age, making the seat easier to pick up.

While politics is an intellectual activity in a lot of ways, not least the all-important part of being good at governing, in many ways it is shallow. That Tom Tugendhat looks like the guy you get from central casting to play the British prime minister is not a small asset. Tugendhat is one of the candidates the Conservative party’s opponents fear the Tory members will pick, and for that reason, they should do it.

Against

When Tom Tugendhat launched his bid for the party leadership in the Telegraph, he included a line about the things that the leadership contest wasn’t really about, because the candidates were all guided by the same “basic principles”:

The ECHR. Gender. Tax rates. Defence spending. Net zero.

There are two problems here. The first is that by making this declaration, he guaranteed that his leadership launch became a conversation about the ECHR, the very thing he wanted to take off the table. The second is that it came as a surprise to some of the MPs who were backing him, who rather thought they were supporting Tom Tugendhat precisely because his “basic principles” on the ECHR were in a different place to, say Robert Jenrick.

Those are both core to the two big question marks around a Tugendhat leadership. The first is that having never held a major domestic portfolio in government, and having held an important post but one where he and the-then Labour opposition were as one, the Tonbridge MP’s political judgment has never really been tested. Is it any good? We don’t know.

Second, it’s not just that most MPs are uncertain where Tom Tugendhat sits, it’s that it is possible that, outside of his area of expertise in foreign and security policy, Tugendhat himself doesn’t know where he sits. This invites concern that his leadership would be one prolonged bit of learning on the job.

In Michael Portillo’s marvellous documentary on Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative successors, David Mellor had a great line. He said that electing William Hague in 1997 was like “opening a good wine too early”. Is Tugendhat really ready to lead the Tory party? It’s not wholly clear.

Now try this

During our holiday, we finally got around to trying Codenames: Duet, the two-player co-operative version of the excellent board game Codenames. It works brilliantly and is a very enjoyable way to while away some time.

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