When Tom Tugendhat was about 20, he felt he needed to understand North Africa better. So he traveled overland from Morocco to Israel, skipping only Libya because it wouldn’t let him in. He did much of the journey on foot.
“Why North Africa?” I asked when we spoke on the phone on Sunday. “Because it… is there?” he replied half-jokingly, echoing George Mallory’s phrase about climbing Mount Everest. Unlike Mallory, Tugendhat survived the journey. He mastered Arabic in Yemen and worked as a journalist in Lebanon before becoming a soldier a few years later.
Tugendhat has survived a few other things on his way to becoming a serious candidate for British Conservative Party leader and thus Boris Johnson’s successor as Prime Minister.
Among them: A 10-hour firefight during his service in Iraq, in which he was twice wounded by friendly fire. Service in Afghanistan, where he was decorated by the 82nd Airborne Division after the capture of Musa Qala – a rare award for a non-American. And opposition to Brexit, which could have meant political death for him as a Tory had he not distinguished himself as Parliament’s most convincing and credible voice on foreign affairs.
For the sake of full disclosure, he’s also managed to endure a longstanding friendship with me—which hopefully won’t kill him in the end.
In a bleak time, Tugendhat is bidding for conservative leadership for traditional centre-right parties, in Britain and other democracies. The basic problem: They’re stale in their diminished center and nutty at their expanding edge. In other words, where there is meaning, there is not much charisma; where there is charisma, it makes almost no sense.
That has been the pattern in Britain under the past twelve years of Tory leadership. There was the colorless and technocratic David Cameron, who lost the vote on Brexit. There was the colorless and oversized Theresa May, who screwed up the execution of Brexit. There was the nothing but colorful Boris Johnson, who made Brexit happen (and in whom I once pinned modest hopes) but lacked the moral character and political principles to make it work. As Johnson once said of himself, “You can’t rule out the possibility that beneath the elaborately constructed veneer of a raging idiot, there’s a raging idiot lurking.”
Tugendhat, on the other hand, represents three things that the current party is not.
The first is an older ideal of conservatism, reminiscent of that of John McCain or Winston Churchill, in which honor (personal, martial, and national) is paramount. If that seems stale, it’s also the best possible remedy for Johnson’s political legacy, which has been the destruction of trust – in the Conservative Partyin governmentin Great Britain itself† If conservatives can’t restore that confidence soon, they will struggle to stay in power.
The second is that Tugendhat, unlike the tax-raising Johnson and the former Chancellor Rishi Sunak, is serious in its philosophical commitment to economic freedom. “We became a party that thought economics was about profit, not about freedom,” he told me. “Freedom is not an economic project. But it will bring growth, prosperity and happiness if you focus on freeing people from limitations.”
The third is that Tugendhat knows a lot about foreign affairs – and about war. Today, that would be an essential asset, not just for Britain, but for all of NATO.
Tugendhat received international praise after delivery last year a gut of a speech in the House of Commons, denouncing the withdrawal of Afghanistan. “The reason I was so angry is because I knew this would encourage our enemies,” he said. “The fundamental betrayal was by the British people and our allies, because our enemies would see us as weak.”
One of those enemies is Vladimir Putin. How does the free world deal with the challenge it poses in Ukraine? “The Ukrainians go through battlefield supplies in hours what we deliver in weeks; we need to increase the rate of fire.” The main goal, he added, is to put Putin in a position where he thinks he can lose.
“Only then will he negotiate — and only then will it be worth negotiating with him,” Tugendhat said.
The West – especially Washington – could use a leader who thinks in these terms, especially in light of a protracted war in which Moscow could use its energy leverage over Europe to pressure Kiev to negotiate an end to the war. Doing what it takes to help Ukraine win may exhaust NATO, but failing will kill both Ukraine and the alliance.
Tugendhat is probably the only leader in Britain who understands the stakes through and through. There are conservatives who will never forgive him against Brexit (how does that work by the way?), but Brexit is a fait accompli. The surest way to put a party on the road to defeat is to spend its time settling old scores rather than facing current or impending dangers. A West facing the challenges of war needs a warrior to lead it.