Cleverly vs Tugendhat: the battle of the bland

It’s become a tradition of recent Tory leadership races that the final two candidates are drawn, roughly speaking, from the two irreconcilable wings of the party – one wet, one dry; one Leave, one Remain; one Lib Dem-curious, one Reform-curious. With Kemi Badenoch and (unbelievably) Robert Jenrick vying to be the darlings of the right-leaning party membership, this has left James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat battling it out to be the candidate for the people who’d never vote Tory anyway.

Tugendhat was first up on stage in yesterday’s beauty parade of the final four leadership candidates. He promised nothing short of a ‘conservative revolution’ – a strange pitch from a candidate who is not really conservative, and certainly not revolutionary. Still, it set the tone for a speech that was full of contradictions. Notably, he spoke of the party’s need to move beyond ‘personalities’, before then talking mostly about his own character, telling us why he is, apparently, so principled, so brave and so popular with voters.

If you didn’t already know that Tommy Tuggers was an officer in the British Army, he took every opportunity to remind us. ‘I was a soldier’ has become the ‘my father was a toolmaker’ of the Tory leadership race. Notably, in this retelling of his life story, he left out that he’s the son of a High Court judge and the nephew of a former vice-president of the European Commission – unlikely to go down well with the pro-Brexit selectorate.

Indeed, this being a Conservative Party leadership election, this thoroughbred Remainer has gone to great lengths to smother any hint of pro-Europeanism. On the question of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), he has tried to pass himself off as an arch-sceptic. He says we should try to reform it, then try to ignore it and then – possibly, maybe, eventually – leave it, if it still prevents the government from deporting foreign criminals (spoiler alert: it will, but Tugendhat still wouldn’t leave it). His broadsides against Strasbourg have been about as convincing as Jeremy Hunt’s attempts to transition from weedy technocrat to born-again Brexiteer when facing off with Boris Johnson back in 2019.

Tugendhat shows exactly what’s wrong with the phoney division between ‘sensibles’ and the supposed rabble. Because on foreign-policy questions – the very thing he cares most about – he is anything but sober and sensible. His sabre-rattling against Russia, China, Iran and other foreign powers is relentless. He seems to have never seen a country he wouldn’t invade. Being a true ‘centrist’, he is at once utterly terrified of the culture war – in 2022, he said we should ‘move on’ from the frightful debate over trans and women’s rights – yet gung-ho for a real war.

Although James Cleverly is also a favourite of so-called sensibles, he’s undeniably the most laddish candidate of the pack. As the Spectator remarked, Cleverly’s delivery made his speech sound like pep talk before a rugby match. The jokes, about being deployed as an army reservist to Luton and taking time out to spend with his Warhammer figurines, were surprisingly decent and self-effacing. Fans of Cleverly’s more risqué, New Lad-era material will have been disappointed, however. He sadly didn’t reprise his routine about spiking his wife’s drinks or getting a female colleague ‘foaming at the gash’.

The Tories, Cleverly said, need to ‘be normal’. A low bar, but one he succeeded in meeting, at least according to his fans. One favourable review gushed that his speech was delivered ‘with normal words, in normal sentences by someone who looked and sounded normal’.

Normal. Sensible. Pragmatic. These are the kinds of vibes the more centrist hopefuls would like to give off. But it’s the allegedly sensible centre that is to blame for so many of Britain’s woes and most deranged policies – from impoverishing Net Zero targets to our dysfunctional asylum system. It’s the desire to be liked at dinner parties that has scuppered so many past leaders. A return to such a ‘normal’ is the last thing the Tories should want from an aspiring leader – and it’s the last thing the nation needs from a potential PM.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.