“It is an honour to introduce the next leader of our party and the next prime minister of our country … Tom Tugendhat!” Harriet Cross, the newly elected Tory MP for Gordon and Buchan invited the crowd to go wild, which they duly did. But of the candidate, there was no sign.

On the applause went. We looked around. Was Tugendhat, an ex-soldier (though he doesn’t like to talk about it) helicoptering in? Was the Tonbridge MP — who used to be in the special forces, but keep it under your hat — going to crash through the windows in a balaclava? 

Unsure what to do, the audience kept clapping, and eventually he appeared. It seems that Tugendhat, a military man who wears it lightly, had trained his team so well that they’d managed to take their own boss by surprise. 

The atmosphere was of one of the better class of evangelical churches welcoming a new vicar: a sense of shared backgrounds and unspoken points of understanding. A church that has been through tricky times with an incumbent who knocked up a Sunday school teacher and then a disastrous flirtation with a female vicar who barely stayed long enough to unpack, but which, following a period of uninspiring leadership from an out-of-his-depth curate, has now got a proper chap in. A fellow with the right sort of background. Put it this way: of all the party’s leadership candidates, Lt Col (can’t talk about it) Tugendhat is the only one you can easily imagine being invited to dinner by David and Sam Cameron.

Tugendhat … is positioned very much as the candidate who Most Publicly Disapproved Of Boris Johnson

Not that he would ever have joined Dave in the Bullingdon Club. Tugendhat (Iraq and Afghanistan, need-to-know, I’m afraid) is positioned very much as the candidate who Most Publicly Disapproved Of Boris Johnson.  “I want to start with an apology,” he said to the room and the nation at large. “The Conservative party owed you better.” There will be no more orgies in the rectory. He had been positioned directly in front of a gold circle of paint on the wood panel behind him, giving TV viewers the impression of a halo. It’s entirely possible this was deliberate.

The long-held and utterly unconcealed distaste for Johnson has led people to believe that Tugendhat — something in uniform, not sure exactly what — is one of his party’s wets. He was about to do his best to disabuse us of this. He quoted Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech, attacked the rise in immigration, and called for Britain to derogate from parts of the European Convention on Human Rights. Was this a desperate attempt to win support from a party whose instincts tend to the rabid? Far from it, he insisted: he’d written a paper on this before he even entered parliament. 

We turned to education. You can tell that this leadership campaign involves a niche electorate because we got several paragraphs of unabashed defence of private schools. We got a heartbreaking story about friends –— “not a rich family” — whose daughter would no longer be able to take up her scholarship at the Royal School of Ballet. This was, we learned, “one of the most vindictive policies that we’ve seen from the British government in generations”. There wasn’t time to list the others, but plausible candidates include the two-child benefit cap and the Rwanda plan. 

Keir Starmer, who has never served in the military, was a Bad Man. Not just for taxing ballerinas, but for his taste in art. “When he took down that portrait of Margaret Thatcher in Number 10,” it was, apparently, “the sort of cheap political stunt that was beneath the dignity of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.” (This is precisely wrong: the portrait was in fact installed by Brown in a cheap political stunt.)

Did Tugendhat, in the nights spent crouched in Afghan foxholes of which he is so reluctant to speak, really worry about the art on the walls of Number 10? It’s certainly hard to imagine that, should he win the leadership, the Tory election campaign of 2029 will focus heavily on the plight of ballerinas cheated of their futures. It seems likely this stuff is in there because he knows he has a vibes problem.

In the last leadership contest but one, Rishi Sunak was undone by vibes: he had voted for Brexit, but exuded Remain. On the other hand Liz Truss, who had campaigned for Remain, had a crazed gleam in her eye that spoke to the guts of party members. Tugendhat — Intelligence Corps, bit hush-hush — has the problem that he has spent years radiating reasonableness. To get past the members, he needs to sound like a fruit loop. Housebuilding? Yes, but not on the Green Belt. This is a manifesto that reaches from Tonbridge all the way to Sevenoaks. 

Defenders of Tugendhat — wears a Special Boat Service tie, won’t say why — would also add that the public perception of him has long been off-beam. He always backed Brexit in parliament and rebelled to vote against Rishi Sunak’s tax rises. He, though it’s sometimes forgotten, is a Conservative MP. Though he has also deployed strategic silences. 

For instance, a journalist asked why he hadn’t spoken out over the immigration policies that he now tells us he opposed when he was security minister? “My job was to keep the King’s secrets,” he replied. “To keep the country safe.” In other words, he could have told us he thought the government was a mess, but then he’d have had to kill us.

He went on. “I delivered on keeping Britain safe. I made sure we got the reforms in areas that I’m afraid I’m never going to talk about.” To be absolutely clear, he’s not saying that he skipped PMQs so he could pop over to Syria and cut a few terrorist throats. But he’s not denying it either.

And then suddenly the sound system abruptly kicked in with a guitar solo and Tugendhat, a veteran who never speaks of his previous career, looked surprised. Caught out again by his own team, the cunning devils.