Is Tom Tugendhat the law and order leadership candidate?

There is still a fortnight to go until parliament returns – but one Tory contender clearly cannot wait to get back to Westminster. Tom Tugendhat this afternoon gave a speech on a theme and at a venue which suited him perfectly: an address at the RUSI military think tank on security. This speech was billed by Tugendhat’s supporters as a chance to show that he is a serious thinker. Yet while there was little here that was truly original, much of it will have had the Tory grassroots nodding along in agreement. ‘We need to end the culture of denial’, he declared, ‘the tendency to move hurriedly on from acts of extreme violence, to obfuscate about the identities and motives of the perpetrators.’

Tugendhat cited the murder of a fellow MP in 2021 as proof of the perils of this wooly thinking – ‘When my friend David Amess was killed by an Islamist we somehow found ourselves debating online civility’.