Tom Tugendhat accuses Reform leader of ‘amplifying false information’ about Southport killings

Nigel Farage was “irresponsible and dangerous” to suggest the police were withholding the truth about the Southport attack, Tory leadership contender Tom Tugendhat has said.

The Conservative hopeful, a former security minister, said Farage had been “amplifying false information” by spreading a theory first suggested by influencers like Andrew Tate, and then failed wholly to condemn the riots.

Universities “indulge in ideologies of grievance instead of transmitting knowledge” and “schools, museums and galleries apologise for our country’s history” instead of “celebrating it”.

That “equality of opportunity” had given way to “critical race theory” and the UK has seen the “politicisation of race” in recent years, which he claimed Labour would do nothing to reverse.

A new “national security police force” is needed to deal with counter-terrorism and to replace Scotland Yard’s “confused mix of national and local responsibilities and its reporting to the mayor and the home secretary, with each blaming the other”.

That defining Islamophobia in law was a bad idea, as it was blasphemy laws for one religion only.

Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, made “delusional” and simply false comments about the UK riots when stating that civil war was inevitable.