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Conservative leadership contender Tom Tugendhat launched a stinging attack on Sir Keir Starmer on Tuesday, accusing the prime minister of not acting quickly enough to stem the wave of far-right violence across England.
“When we needed a strong government, we got a party still in the mindset of opposition,” Tugendhat said in a campaign speech at the Royal United Services Institute, a defence think-tank, in London. “When we needed a leader, we got a lawyer waiting for the case to reach court.”
In the most forthright attack by any of the six Tory MPs vying to replace Rishi Sunak as leader of the opposition, Tugendhat said Starmer had been too slow to call a meeting of Cobra, Whitehall’s emergency response group.
Starmer, a former barrister, first convened Cobra on August 5, six days after riots erupted following a mass stabbing in Southport, north west England.
Tugendhat said that if Starmer had chaired a daily meeting of the crisis group from the outset of the disorder, as then Tory prime minister Lord David Cameron had during the 2011 riots in London, police forces would have had “more of what they needed”.
“They could have cancelled leave, extended mutual aid, and confronted the rioters earlier with an overwhelming police presence,” Tugendhat said. “This has been the government’s first real test and the prime minister fell short.
He also hit out at “delusional” and “simply false” comments made by Elon Musk on X in relation to the violence but said it was beyond the UK’s remit to attempt to rebuke or sanction the tech billionaire, because his social media site operated in a different jurisdiction and was accountable to its shareholders.
In posts on X, where the spread of disinformation has been accused of fuelling the riots, Musk has said “civil war is inevitable” and likened the UK to the Soviet Union for its policing of offensive speech.
Tugendhat’s rivals for the Conservative leadership are shadow business secretary Kemi Badenoch, shadow home secretary James Cleverly, former home secretary Priti Patel, former immigration minister Robert Jenrick and shadow work and pensions secretary Mel Stride.
The winner of the race to replace Sunak will be announced on November 2, and Cleverly and Tugendhat are seen as the most attractive propositions to “one nation”, centrist Tory members.
Several of the hopefuls have positioned themselves as proponents of robust law and order since the outbreak of the unrest, which has so far led to more than 900 arrests, and are jostling to say 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 severely than left-wing groups — have proliferated on the right since the outbreak of the riots.
While Tugendhat did not say there had been discrepancies in the way police treated specific groups in society, he said forces had demonstrated “inconsistency” and “weakness” in their handling of some recent protests, including pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
He also ruled out making a deal with Reform or allowing Farage to enter the Tory party under his leadership.
Downing Street on Monday said it “welcomed” a de-escalation in violence over the weekend but added that it was “not complacent” and remained “on high alert”.
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