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“Taken 9/2 against Tom Tugendhat and 9/1 against James Cleverly to be the next leader of the Conservative Party.”
And now Tugendhat declares. Cleverly is the only other declared candidate, up to now.
Message to all the other people thinking of standing (in the unlikely event they are reading): Please don’t bother. Leave it to James and Tom, so I am on a certainty.
Just when I thought there was at least one decent Conservative MP left Tugendhat is now saying he’s quite happy for us to leave the ECHR. So now I know why he supported Truss ( which made me begin to distrust him at the time….).
ECHR Needs reforming or replacing, Moehat.
It’s of a different time.Value Is EverythingECHR Needs reforming or replacing, Moehat.
It’s of a different time.Not in my opinion.
I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I've walked and I crawled on six crooked highwaysTugendhat has no intention of leaving the ECHR, even if he was in a position to do anything about it. He is only saying it to appeal to the Conservative Party membership, as he will need their support if the same rules used in previous contests are used again.
He could quite easily fit into Starmer’s Cabinet but for reasons best known to himself is in the Conservative Party instead. Another Rory Stewart, which is why so many Guardian readers say they like him.
If he wins, he will receive praise from people who have no intention of ever voting Conservative. But will he win back the voters the Conservative Party needs? The people who either stayed at home or the 4 million who voted for Reform?
It’s not as simple as moving even further to the right in order to “win back” those Reform voters.
For a start, not all of those 4 million are traditionally Conservative voters. Secondly, lurching to the right further alienates the moderate “One Nation” party members.
That is the challenge and dilemma facing the Conservative Party. They will need to win back some Reform voters. An insurgent party on the right taking 4 million votes is obviously a problem for the Conservatives. But court those voters too much and they risk losing some voters to Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
The Conservative 2019 majority was really a loose coalition based on exhaustion with the Brexit issue. Once that was out of the way,I don’t think the Conservatives had any real strategy for retaining the former Labour voters in the “Red Wall”.
As for Tugendhat, as Patrick O’Flynn writes in The Spectator: “When BBC Today host Emma Barnett interviewed him this morning and asked him to give an unqualified statement that he was prepared to leave the ECHR, he repeatedly dodged doing so…the idea that this British-French dual national husband of a high-powered French lawyer will one day rival Farage as an ECHR leaver is simply not credible.”
He isn’t trying to appeal to Conservative voters. He’s trying to appeal to UKIP/Reform voters. Which is what got the party in the mess it’s in in the first place. As for the ECHR. Let’s scrap it, eh. Who needs human rights?
Out of all of the seats Labour won, the second placed party was the Conservatives in 217 of them, Reform in 89. I don’t have figures for second to the Lib Dems but I’m sure there are probably quite a few.
Under FPTP, which way does winning back power lie? Yes Reform are to be taken seriously but as I have said before, a Farage tribute act is not the answer. They need to win back Labour, Lib Dem and stay at home voters far more than Reform.
This is of course a leadership election and a drift to the left isn’t the way to win the members’ backing but presumably the idea is for the next leader to be there until 2029 so choose carefully chaps.
Tugendhat is only saying it to appeal to those who may have a vote in the leadership election. What he does if he wins is another matter.
The idea he actually wants to leave the ECHR and be a Nigel Farage tribute act taking the Conservative Party to the right is too ridiculous for words.
I was referring only to the party in general. Some want to take it slightly back towards the centre, some even further right. One will work with the membership, the other might help with the electorate as a whole.
Mel Stride, he of one of the wafer thin Devon majorities discussed before, also announced.
Tom Tugendhat’s campaign has had to change its slogan after it spelt out a rather unfortunate word.
The original slogan read: “Together we can, Unite the party. Rebuild trust. Defeat Labour” but it was soon pointed out that the first letter of the first word of each sentence read as ‘turd’.
It was quietly changed on Thursday, with the final line being replaced with the words: “Win back the country”.I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I've walked and I crawled on six crooked highwaysBadenoch and Patel have both entered the leadership race today, taking the total to six.
The deadline is at 14:30 tomorrow.
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