Tory leadership hopeful Tom Tugendhat has revealed the "naughtiest thing" he's ever done as he responded to a question by Sky News' Sophy Ridge on Sunday.
"Well, I invaded a country once," Tugendhat, a former soldier who now chairs the Commons foreign affairs committee, replied, prompting Ridge to chuckle.
Tugendhat previously pointed to his experience in the military to sell himself as the UK's next prime minister after Boris Johnson had announced his decision to stand down.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph earlier this week to announce his leadership bid, Tugendhat said: “I have served before – in the military, and now in Parliament. Now I hope to answer the call once again as prime minister.”
Tugendhat served with the Royal Marines in Iraq when the US-led coalition invaded the country in 2003 and toppled the Saddam Hussein government. Tugendhat also served during the War in Afghanistan, and was critical of how Boris Johnson handled the troop withdrawal from the Central Asian country, describing the fall of Kabul to the Taliban* as the UK's "biggest foreign policy disaster since Suez."
Appearing on Ridge's Sunday show, Tugendhat spoke of the "extraordinary" lessons he learned from serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. During his stint in the Royal Marines, he was injured, and at one point had a doctor fill out a death notice for him before he miraculously turned up alive.
Speaking with The Sunday Times, Tugendhat recounted his near-death experience in Iraq, where a British helicopter, which was called in for evacuation, fired on him after mistaking him for the enemy.
“We were in a very, very small group. We had been fighting a nine, ten-hour running battle. I was shot through the chin and the top of the chest, but that hit the body armour so it was OK.”
Tugendhat's leadership bid didn't come as a surprise: the 49-year-old had made it clear in January that he would run if Boris Johnson were to be ousted.
Aside from Tugendhat, Sajid Javid, Jeremy Hunt, Nadhim Zahawi, Grant Shapps, Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch, and Penny Mordaunt have also launched campaigns for the premiership. Liz Truss is widely expected to join the fray.
The outgoing prime minister, Boris Johnson, claimed in 2019 that the "naughtiest" thing he had ever done was that he had ridden his bicycle on the pavement. Johnson, who's had a colorful life, to say the least, did specify that it was the only thing he was "prepared to admit."
Not known for acts of wild abandon - apart from her puzzling robotic dancing - ex-UK Prime Minister Theresa May replied to the same question with "running through the fields of wheat" as a child.
“The farmers weren’t too pleased about that,” May explained back in 2017.
*The Taliban is under UN sanctions for terrorist activities.