Tom Tugendhat, the Conservative Party MP and former Army officer, is expected to give an impassioned speech today about the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson. Tugendhat is the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and he says that his boss is “hobbled” by the fact that the Foreign Office doesn’t really have an awful lot of power.
Sources have leaked the content of the upcoming speech to the press, and it’s mostly critical of how Johnson has been struggling with a recent Whitehall decision not to make the Foreign Office a wider-spanning department that could focus on strategy and diplomacy.
Tugendhat says that the “lack of power” in the department is starting to get to him. They don’t get a say on trade, and ever since Brexit, a lot of the Foreign Officer’s powers and responsibilities have been delegated to the newly formed Department for Exiting the European Union.
Tugendhat could be the next Conservative Party leader
Tugendhat has been tipped to be the next leader of the Conservative Party, and he certainly seems to have lofty ambitions in his political career. Johnson himself doesn’t see a future as the party’s leader, or as the Prime Minister, saying instead that there’s more likelihood of “finding Elvis on Mars, or my being reincarnated as an olive.”
