Tom Tugendhat, a member of the British Parliament for Tonbridge and Malling, is pictured in London in January 2019.Eric TSCHAEN/REA/Redux
At 48 this month, British Member of Parliament Tom Tugendhat has a young, smooth, face. The head is ringed with dark, blondish hair; the smile all top teeth. But if he is a touch cherubic, there is a hardness there, too. The skin is taut, especially around the jaw; the eyes are two blue flints that can look brown. But it’s those incongruities that make him interesting—much like his politics.
Tugendhat’s story is of passing through all of Britain’s institutions—with a caveat. Public school (but metropolitan), the army (but a reservist), Oxbridge (but postgrad). Everything about Tugendhat is theoretically correct, but slightly off. He is like a blurred daguerreotype of a traditional Tory; different but sufficiently similar, which is how change always comes—at least in Britain. And what he represents is a Britain in which the elite institutions remain, but those who pass through them are starting to change.
