“We think it is wrong to have a man in the Foreign Office who ties our energy to China instead of deepening and strengthening our union by tapping resources from the North Sea.”
“We think it is wrong to have a Foreign Secretary who chooses virtue signalling over intelligence sharing in a way that will keep Britain safe. That’s not serving the British people, that is serving his personal agenda,” Tugendhat went on, apparently in reference to reports first published by the Spectator that British intelligence had cautioned against imposing sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
He then made a further joke at Miliband and Andy Burnham’s expense, saying that given “how quickly Andy changes his mind” he may end up “against David Miliband by the time we get back to Westminster”, adding: “At least there’s one Miliband who knows his foreign policy.”
David Miliband, the former foreign secretary in Gordon Brown’s government, currently serves as president of the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid organisation.
Tugendhat also criticised some officials in the Foreign Office, saying that “for too long” many had “acted as though they were an international NGO”.
“They’ve forgotten that treaties are there to make Britain stronger, not to make us weaker.”
And that the job of the King’s representatives is to defend the King’s realm”, he added.
Later in his speech, he signalled a major departure from previous foreign policy doctrines, saying that: “For 20 years we told ourselves that trade would tame tyrants, and we believed we could save on defence. Well, I’m afraid Conference, it’s just not true.”
He pledged that Conservative foreign policy would put “the British people first” and “sees the world as it is and doesn’t pretend we can stand alone or go back to the past”.
After Tugendhat, the conference heard from Shadow Welfare Secretary Helen Watley on the need to cut welfare to fund defence and a stark warning from historian Niall Ferguson, who, looking at the state of international affairs, said it was not “alarmist to say we may be on the path to another world war”.
A Shahed drone that was used by Russia on display during the Conservative Party conference at the International Convention Centre, Birmingham. (Image: Jacob King/PA Wire).Jacob King/PA Wire
Above the stage in the symphony hall in Birmingham’s International Convention Centre loomed an Iranian Shahed drone which had been fired on Ukraine by Russian forces and acquired by policy organisation United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI).
James Cartlidge, the shadow defence secretary, pointed to the drone during his address to the conference and said Britain would be deluded “if we think a drone like this could never be fired at the UK”.
“Hope will not stop an Iranian drone. Vibes will not bring down a Russian cruise missile”, he added as he unveiled that the Conservatives would, if elected, build a “fully integrated, multi-layered missile defence system capable of protecting our nation from drone and missile attack.”
The programme, labelled Britannia Shield and dubbed by some as Britain’s “Iron Dome”, would cost an estimated £10 billion and would amount to “one of Britain's most significant military programmes since the Cold War” and that it was necessary as a result of the scale of the threats faced by Britain and funded by cuts to welfare spending.
It would, he claimed, complement the UK’s nuclear deterrent programme, Trident, noting that Britannia, the poetic personification of Great Britain, “had both a trident and a shield.”
“With this plan, we would have both nuclear and conventional deterrence, truly making our country safe and our people secure.”
