Nigel Farage was “irresponsible and dangerous” to suggest the police were withholding the truth about the Southport attack, Tory leadership contender Tom Tugendhat has said. The Conservative hopeful, a former security minister, said Farage had been “amplifying false information” by spreading a theory first suggested by influencers like Andrew Tate, and then failed wholly to condemn the riots. “I want to be clear: this is not leadership. It is deeply irresponsible and dangerous,” he said. Speaking in London, Tugendhat did not reserve all his criticism for Farage, who he said would not be admitted to the Conservative party on his watch. He also attacked Keir Starmer for failing to bring the riots under control more quickly, despite the prime minister having been largely praised for his handling of the unrest by speeding up the justice process. Tugendhat said: “If he had chaired a daily Cobra meeting – with senior police officers, the security services, the army and others – the prime minister could have given the police more of what they needed. “They could have cancelled leave, extended mutual aid, and confronted the rioters earlier with an overwhelming police presence. We did not see this leadership. “They could have backfilled policing roles by calling up all special constables and using the army for back-office duties. They could have decided – before the shameful scenes outside the hotel in Rotherham – to allow the police to use appropriate force.” The Conservative MP said arrests should be made while violent protests were occurring, and not in the subsequent days.
“As security minister, I constantly had to encourage the police to make arrests as crimes were being committed, rather than waiting until after a protest had finished,” he said. “Once people cross the line, they need to be met with immediate and uncompromising force.” Tugendhat, 51, added: “In all, these riots lasted for more than a week – longer than the more severe riots of 2011. The lessons were already there. They were not applied. They could and should have been stopped earlier.” He also said Home Office minister Jess Phillips ought to have been sacked by Starmer for having “sought to justify vigilantism and violence, to excuse a militia on our streets” when there were violent counter-protests in Birmingham. In his wide-ranging speech, Tugendhat went on to say: Universities “indulge in ideologies of grievance instead of transmitting knowledge” and “schools, museums and galleries apologise for our country’s history” instead of “celebrating it”. That “equality of opportunity” had given way to “critical race theory” and the UK has seen the “politicisation of race” in recent years, which he claimed Labour would do nothing to reverse. A new “national security police force” is needed to deal with counter-terrorism and to replace Scotland Yard’s “confused mix of national and local responsibilities and its reporting to the mayor and the home secretary, with each blaming the other”. That defining Islamophobia in law was a bad idea, as it was blasphemy laws for one religion only. Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, made “delusional” and simply false comments about the UK riots when stating that civil war was inevitable. The leadership hopeful gave the speech outlining his views on how to deal with the aftermath of the riots after being relatively quiet during the unrest itself. Fellow leadership contenders James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel and Mel Stride have all condemned the rioters, while Kemi Badenoch, the favourite, has been accused of submarine tactics for keeping a low profile on the issue. Tugendhat said the UK needed reform of “inconsistent” policing, which he said had been “too weak” at times and left some rioters capable of violent disorder without a major visible presence by officers. However, he dismissed the idea that there was “two-tier policing” in the UK, a theory popularised by Farage, saying that there is a difference between public protests in which a minority turn violent, and disorder started deliberately by those intent on violence. Responding to Tugendhat’s criticism of Farage, Lee Anderson, the Reform MP, said: “Once again we see the Tories try to gaslight and shift the blame from their failures and broken promises over mass immigration. “It is no wonder that polling out today [Tuesday] shows a third of Conservative supporters do not care who their next leader is.”