You can take the soldier out of the Army, but you can’t take the Army out of a former serviceman… Meeting Tom Tugendhat, Conservative MP for Tonbridge and Malling, and a former lieutenant colonel who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, is quite the military operation.
As I follow his PA through the labyrinthine passages leading to his modest office off an anonymous corridor in the House of Commons, I reassure her that I will only need an hour of Tugendhat’s time. “Actually, you are scheduled for 45 minutes,” she says. And right on cue comes a knock on the door exactly three quarters of an hour after we meet.
I would have liked to have heard more of the thoughts of this friendly, youthful 42-year-old father of one (whose name is pronounced too-gen-hart). While for now he may be the least well-known member of a famous family – his father is the retired High Court judge Sir Michael Tugendhat and his uncle is fellow Conservative politician Christopher Tugendhat – his is a name to watch.
He won plaudits this July after a spellbinding performance on BBC’s Question Time during which he reflected on his time in Iraq. His testimony as someone who had actually fought on the ground gave his words heft. Tugendhat said the errors of the Blair administration highlighted in the Chilcot report had not surprised him. He went on to deliver a scathing critique of senior commanders of the Armed Forces and foreign diplomats.
At a time when Syria remains entrenched in civil war, ISIS continues to fight in Iraq, conflict threatens to spill over into Lebanon and Jordan, and thousands of migrants continue to flee to Europe from the failed state in Libya, the Middle East is likely to dominate British foreign policy during this parliament and beyond. A major voice in those debates is likely to be Tugendhat’s: in such an uncertain world he wants to see defence properly funded and is concerned about any more spending cuts.
Tugendhat was a pupil at St Paul’s and studied theology at Bristol University. He went on to do a Masters in Islamic Studies at Cambridge and learned Arabic in Yemen. A firm Remainer, what then are his thoughts on the current Foreign Secretary, fellow public schoolboy Boris Johnson? “He sold an extraordinary message to the British people,” Tugendhat says, before adding, simply, that Johnson has a very hard job.
Right now Tugendhat is concentrating on the concerns of his Kent constituents and stresses that he has not been elected as a representative of the Armed Forces. On the home front, his Catholic faith has influenced his attitude to social policy, in particular his thoughts on dementia and pensions. He seeks a balance between the parable of the Good Samaritan and that of the talents. “My politics sit somewhere in the middle, in that I believe it’s important for people to take risks and achieve and fufil their talents, but I also think we need to protect the most vulnerable,” he says.
In particular, he is concerned about the unfairness of what he describes as “hidden taxation”: the fees levied by asset management firms on people’s pensions, which they only discover when they are old and vulnerable and unable to challenge them easily.
He is concerned, too, about the decline of a common language in Britain when we are faced with grief or trauma – a function that was once provided by religion. He remembers the moment after the death of the murdered MP Jo Cox when he was placing a bunch of flowers in her memory outside the Commons. “The Commons chaplain recited the Lord’s Prayer and ‘The Lord is my shepherd’,” he recalls, “but many of the MPs who were gathered round didn’t know the words.”
While the answer doesn’t have to be Christianity, he thinks there is a role for religious leaders to comment on social matters. “I would say, for example, that it’s right that Church leaders say we should care for the vulnerable and the homeless. What they shouldn’t do is stray into pure politics and say, for example, that the answer is increasing taxes or whatever.”
He is unwilling to be drawn much on his own spiritual life. He describes Catholicism as the “faith of my fathers”. He went to church regularly as a boy and still does. He will not comment on the role of prayer in his life now or when he was a soldier risking his life. “It’s not like that,” he says. “When you are in battle, it’s an extremely focusing experience when you are concentrating on the job. Oddly, everything seems to happen more slowly.”
What he is grateful for in terms of his faith is the contribution of Catholicism to our sense of identity as a country. “The last 1,000 years of our history as a Christian country has inspired our notion of individual rights and our belief in democracy. We are all equal before God, a key concept of Christianity which is not shared by all faiths.”
He is also grateful for an upbringing which he says was unpressurised, even though he belongs to a family of such high-achievers, and describes himself as “not terribly hard-working” when he was younger.
That is not the case now. The bell is ringing outside his office summoning him to the Commons chamber. There are causes to fight and speeches to write. The biggest pressure on him now is time, he says. His Army training has given him discipline and an eye on the clock. I expect we will be hearing more from him in future.
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