Conservative leadership hopeful Tom Tugendhat appeared to channel his inner Albus Dumbledore as the first of three live TV debates kicked off tonight.
The word ‘Dumbledore’ was soon trending on Twitter when the former military officer quoted JK Rowling’s character from her beloved Harry Potter series after being asked: ‘Why should the public trust you?’
Mr Tugendhat, 49, echoed Dumbledore’s tribute to Neville Longbottom when he told the debate: ‘It’s easy to stand up to your enemies – it’s sometimes harder to stand up to your friends.’
He spoke while acknowledging ‘trust in politics has been collapsing, trust in our party has been collapsing’, and added: ‘I’ve been holding a mirror to many of our actions and asking those in our party, those in our leadership positions, to ask themselves “is that what the public really expects?”
‘Are you serving the people of the United Kingdom or are you serving your career? Because that’s the real question tonight.
‘That’s the real question for all of us.’
Twitter users were quick to notice the similarity to Dumbledore’s famous quote, ‘It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends’, before he awarded Neville Longbottom with 10 points for Gryffindor in Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone.
‘Is Tom Tugendhat a Harry Potter fan?’ one person wrote.
‘Don’t think any of us expected Tom Tugendhat to be straight out of the gate with a direct quote from Dumbledore,’ another said.
Mr Tugendhat joined fellow Tory leadership contenders Kemi Badenoch, Penny Mordaunt, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss at the debate on Friday, hosted by Krishan Guru-Murthy.
They were later asked to give a yes/no answer on whether Boris Johnson was honest.
Kemi Badenoch told the Channel 4 debate: ‘Sometimes.’
Penny Mordaunt said: ‘There have been some really severe issues and I think he has paid a price for that.’
Rishi Sunak said: ‘I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt for as long as possible and ultimately I reached the conclusion that I couldn’t, and that’s why I resigned… There were a number of reasons that I resigned but trust and honesty was part of that.’
Liz Truss said ‘he has been very clear himself that he made mistakes in Government’ but she had taken his explanation for inaccurate statements over partygate ‘at face value’.
Asked the same question about whether Boris Johnson was an honest man, Mr Tugendhat said: ‘No.’
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