Speaker

Tom Tugendhat

Tom Tugendhat

British Conservative politician, army veteran, and former UK Security Minister; Member of Parliament for Tonbridge since 2015 and former chair of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

Before entering Parliament, Tugendhat served in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, worked for the Foreign Office, helped establish the National Security Council of Afghanistan, and served as military assistant to the Chief of the Defence Staff, the UK’s most senior military officer. First elected in 2015, he was chosen by fellow MPs as a backbencher to chair the Foreign Affairs Committee, and later served as Minister of State for Security. His outspoken criticism of Russia, China, and Iran led to sanctions against him from all three states. He stood in the 2024 Conservative Party leadership contest following the party’s general-election defeat.

Core positions

  • Britain’s core governance failure is over-centralisation, not weak institutions. He argues London’s mayor and the UK’s devolved administrations hold far less planning and fiscal power than their US or continental European counterparts, and that decades of national underinvestment in infrastructure — not a lack of institutional machinery — explains regional economic imbalance.
  • Devolution fails when it breaks the link between authority, responsibility, and accountability. Devolved representatives can promise spending they lack the tax base to fund, then blame Westminster when it doesn’t appear.
  • Parliament’s forced, ongoing partnerships protect long-term interest over short-term politics. He credits the need for roughly 650 MPs to keep working together, regardless of any single vote’s outcome, with preserving genuinely liberal government even without a written liberal-individualist constitution.
  • The House of Lords should be reformed, not abolished. Its freedom from electoral pressure lets it think generationally in a way elected chambers structurally cannot; he would convert its hereditary composition into a jury-style temporary lottery.
  • State actors are usually rational within their own frame. He reads groups such as the Houthis as pursuing coherent, if locally rational, goals — and describes years of access to classified intelligence as leaving him convinced that ‘cock-up’, not conspiracy, explains most state behaviour.

In the wiki