Tom Harwood

Harwood was born in Cambridge, England. His father is a director at a property consultancy, and his mother is a primary school teacher.[2] Harwood attended The Perse School, an independent school in Cambridge.[3] Whilst there he was commended for his roles in Model United Nations[4] and a mock trial competition at the Cambridge Crown Court.[3]

He studied politics at St Mary's College, Durham where he was elected as president of the Durham Union Society.[5][6] Harwood ran a successful satirical campaign to become a National Union of Students (NUS) delegate, criticising the organisation with viral videos and satirical pledges such as using NUS funds to build a fully functional Death Star, and defeating the terrorist group ISIS with an NUS boycott.[5][7] He was elected in what The Times newspaper described as "a landslide victory" that gained national attention in December 2016.[8] After his election, he appeared on the BBC's Daily Politics show.[9]

Harwood later ran for the presidency of the NUS in 2017 with a similar campaign and was endorsed by the University of Manchester Students' Union.[10][11] The union was the only one to hold a primary election in which students could vote for their candidate.[12] Their vote mandated their delegates to vote for him in the NUS presidential election.[11] He finished a distant third in the election, with 35 votes out of the 1,200 NUS delegates.[13] In the following year, Harwood ran another satirical campaign to lower the voting age to 12.[14]

While at university, Harwood also became the national chair of pro-Brexit campaign group Students for Britain, an arm of the official Brexit campaign organisation Vote Leave.[15][16][17] In 2017, he worked for the American libertarian organisation Students for Liberty.[18] He was a Conservative Party candidate for the East Chesterton ward in the 2018 Cambridge City Council election. In the election, the two Labour candidates were elected.[19] Harwood received 336 votes, and finished in 6th place.[20] Harwood became a reporter for the right-wing political news website Guido Fawkes in July 2018.[21]

He was listed in talk radio station LBC's list of top 100 most influential Conservatives of 2019.[22] Harwood was briefly a member of Turning Point UK, an offshoot of the US right-wing student organisation Turning Point USA,[23][24] distancing himself from the group days after it launched.[25] He has been a columnist for The Daily Telegraph newspaper since May 2019.[26] In 2020, he was listed as one of Tatler Magazine's nine new power networkers.[27] Harwood has also appeared as a political commentator on Good Morning Britain, Newsnight, BBC Breakfast and Question Time.[28]

• Tom Harwood on The Telegraph
• Tom Harwood at IMDb