Tugendhat joins race to be next Tory leader

Former minister Tom Tugendhat has announced he is running to be the next Conservative leader.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, he said he was “not just running to be the next Conservative leader" but also to become the "next Conservative prime minister".

Mr Tugendhat is the second Tory MP to enter the contest to replace Rishi Sunak as party leader, following former Home Secretary James Cleverly's announcement on Tuesday.

Mr Sunak announced his resignation shortly after the party fell to its heaviest ever defeat in the 4 July general election.

He will stay in the role until a replacement is picked.

Setting out his stall to be the new leader, Mr Tugendhat said his party had lost the last election because it “lost the trust of the British people”.

“The public wanted the things we promised: lower taxes, lower immigration, more control over their everyday lives," he wrote in the Telegraph.

"Those are Conservative ideas. We just didn’t deliver.

“We couldn’t deliver because we were too focused on fighting each other.”

He also suggested he would be willing to leave the European Court of Human Rights, saying: "We know that if institutions do not serve the British people and make it harder to control our own borders, then we will have to exempt ourselves from them, or leave their jurisdiction."

Before joining Parliament, Mr Tugendhat, 51, was an Army officer who served in Irag and Afghanistan.

In 2015, he was elected MP for the Kent constituency of Tonbridge.

As chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee he was highly critical of the West's withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

He also publicly criticised Boris Johnson over the partygate saga, saying the government did not “look serious”.

When Mr Johnson resigned in 2022, Mr Tugendhat ran to replace him as party leader, but was eliminated in the third round of voting.

From September 2022 until the general election earlier this month he served as security minister in the Home Office.

He has generally been considered to be part of the “centrist” One Nation group of Conservative MPs.

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