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Conservative leadership candidate Tom Tugendhat delivered a stinging criticism of Sir Keir Starmer on Tuesday, accusing the prime minister of not acting quickly enough to stem the tide of far-right violence across Britain.
“When we need a strong government, we have a party that is still in opposition,” Tugendhat said in a campaign speech at the Royal United Services Institute, a defense think tank, in London. “When we need a leader, we have a lawyer waiting for the case to go to court.”
In the most direct attack yet by one of the six Conservative MPs vying to replace Rishi Sunak as opposition leader, Tugendhat said Starmer had been too slow in calling a meeting of Cobra, Whitehall’s emergency response group.
Starmer, a former barrister, first convened Cobra on 5 August, six days after rioting broke out following a mass stabbing in Southport, north-west England.
Tugendhat said if Starmer had chaired the daily crisis team meeting at the outset of the unrest, as then-Conservative prime minister Sir David Cameron did during the 2011 London riots, the police force would have had “more than they need”.
“They could have lifted the furlough, extended mutual aid and confronted the rioters earlier with an overwhelming police presence,” Tugendhat said. “This is the first real test of the government and the prime minister has failed to deliver.
He also criticised Elon Musk’s “delusional” and “completely false” comments about X involving violence but said trying to reprimand or punish the tech billionaire was outside the UK’s jurisdiction, as his social media site operates in a different jurisdiction and is accountable to shareholders.
In posts on X, where misinformation has been blamed for causing riots, Musk has said that “civil war is inevitable” and likened the UK to the Soviet Union over its policies on hate speech.
Tugendhat’s rivals in the Conservative leadership race are Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch, Home Secretary James Cleverly, former Home Secretary Priti Patel, former Immigration Secretary Robert Jenrick and Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride.
Winner in the race to replace Sunak will be announced on November 2ndand Cleverly and Tugendhat are seen as the most attractive proposals to “one nation” centrist Conservatives.
Several candidates have positioned themselves as advocates of strict law and order since the unrest erupted, which has so far led to more than 900 arrests, and are scrambling to talk about how they would deal with the electoral threat posed by Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK party.
Accusations of “two-tier policing” — the idea that right-wing groups are treated more harshly than left-wing groups — have been growing on the right since the riots began.
While Tugendhat did not say there were differences in how police treated particular groups in society, he said the force had shown “inconsistency” and “weakness” in its handling of some recent protests, including pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
He also ruled out reaching a deal with Reform or allowing Farage to join the Conservative Party under his leadership.
On Monday, Downing Street said it “welcomed” the de-escalation of violence over the weekend but added that it was “not complacent” and remained “on high alert”.
