Next up was Tom Tugendhat. He is fast emerging not just as one of the few sane Tories left in Westminster, but as one of the great survivors. After years as Boris Johnson’s nemesis as chairman of the foreign affairs select committee, one-nation Tugendhat found himself briefly in the limelight when he ran for the Conservative leadership in the summer. He did better than some – think Jeremy Hunt, Nadhim Zahawi and Sajid Javid – and made it to the first televised debate, but was soon eliminated. Although probably to his as much surprise as everyone else’s, he then found himself in Liz Truss’s cabinet as security minister. This is how Tugendhat survived. Mostly doing and saying absolutely nothing for the seven weeks Librium Liz was in government. In fact, no one is even sure if Tugendhat ever bothered to get out of bed. A bedridden, eclectic mute was by far the best persona to navigate in the halcyon Truss days. His silence was rewarded with Rishi Sunak deciding that Tugendhat was one of the few Truss ministers worth keeping in his own cabinet. But finally Tom Tug was forced to come out for an urgent question about Chinese rogue police departments in the UK. Great survivor Tom Tugendhat answers an urgent question. Photo: Jessica Parker/Parliament And everything turned into a piece of love. Because not only did the Tories like their man, so did the opposition parties. In a parallel universe, Tugendhat could have easily ended up as one of them. Politically they are much closer to the center of the Labor Party than to the right of the Tories. The urgent question had been raised by Alicia Kearns, the new chair of the foreign affairs committee, so there was much mutual congratulations. Allow me to congratulate the former chairman of the foreign affairs select committee on his new role and his first foray into the dispatch box. Oh, no, no, no. I should congratulate the honorable lady on becoming the new chair-elect of the committee. Oh, no, no. After you. Oh, no, no, no. After you. Iain Duncan Smith pointed out that other countries had been a little quicker to locate Chinese police stations in their own countries, but he was not going to blame Tom Tug as he was one of the good guys and could not be held responsible for any government failures. Alistair Carmichael came up with the most innovative solution. Why didn’t the UK set up some police stations in China? Brilliant. Just send the Met to Beijing and make millions by busting the Chinese for speeding. Tugendhat wasn’t done. Once he finished UQ, he was back on his feet for his first ministerial statement. About creating a task force to protect the country which he couldn’t really tell MPs about because if he did it would either kill them or himself. They all just nodded together. Even Labour’s Yvette Cooper. And she agreed that Tom was a terrible guy. He just wanted to know what the government was doing about Johnson, Truss and Suella Braverman. All of them seemed to have a strange approach to national security. Convict enjoyed hanging out with the KGB, Librium Liz managed to get her phone hacked, while Leaky Sue sent government secrets to her partners. One of whom, John Hayes, happened to be wandering around the room trying to tell anyone who would listen that he knew nothing about anything. Subscribe to The Guardian Headlines UK A roundup of the top morning headlines emailed straight to you every day of the week Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Tom Tug resisted the temptation to enjoy Cooper. He probably just said that he had been told on secret council terms how incredibly stupid his colleagues were. So could he leave it at that for now? It wasn’t going to serve any higher purpose to prove that they were disastrously unfit for office when they weren’t in the room. And that was it. Tugendhat could return to the Trappist wellness clinic. But that was not the end of the strange, almost magical, consensus. Because the biggest burst of agreement was around Door Matt Hancock. You couldn’t find anyone who didn’t think they were totally feminine. His vanity meets hubris on I’m a Celebrity. Poor Matt. Delusional until the end. He wanted to connect with real people, he said. And now was the time to do it. When the UK was still in utter chaos and no one would lose their valuable input as an MP. That was true. It was a chance for little people to hear about his fantastic new book, Pandemic Diaries. The daily story of a man brought up so far from his depths, he ended up killing scores of elderly Covid patients by sending them back to nursing homes. A man who paid the ultimate sacrifice just because he dared to fall in love with someone else’s wife, leaving his own, and is caught on CCTV groping and groping like a teenager. A true life story of a man whose mid-life crisis led him to break the rules. He fought the law and the law won. A man so needy that he imagined the public could fall in love with him. A man so dim he couldn’t see that he would end up being forced to do the bushtucker trial night after night. A man destined to fade into obscurity as he chokes on kangaroo scrotum. He will not miss Westminster.
