Tom Harwood | |
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![]() Harwood in 2021 | |
Born | Thomas Hedley Fairfax Harwood 26 August 1996 Cambridge, England |
Alma mater | St Mary's College, Durham University (BA) |
Occupation(s) | Journalist, political commentator |
Website | tomharwood |
Thomas Hedley Fairfax Harwood (born 26 August 1996) is a British journalist, political commentator and television show host. He became the deputy political editor of GB News in March 2023. Harwood previously worked as a reporter for the right-wing political news website Guido Fawkes between 2018 and 2021, and was a regular contributor to The Daily Telegraph , writing online columns from 2019 to 2021.
Harwood was born on 26 August 1996. [1] [2] He grew up in Cambridge, England. [3] Harwood attended The Perse School, a private school in the city. [4]
He studied politics at Durham University, where he was elected as president of its debating society, the Durham Union. [5] [6] Harwood ran a satirical campaign to become a National Union of Students (NUS) delegate, criticising the organisation with viral videos and satirical pledges such as using its funds to build a Death Star, and defeating the terrorist group ISIS with a 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 directly 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. [4] In the following year, Harwood appeared on the BBC's Daily Politics show again due to another satirical campaign to lower the voting age to 12. [13]
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. [7] [14] [15] In 2017, he worked for the American libertarian organisation Students for Liberty. [16] 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. [17] Harwood received 336 votes, and finished in 6th place. [18] Harwood became a reporter for the right-wing political news website Guido Fawkes in July 2018. [7] [19]
Harwood was listed in talk radio station LBC's list of top 100 most influential Conservatives of 2019. [20] Harwood was briefly a member of Turning Point UK, an offshoot of the US right-wing student organisation Turning Point USA, [21] [22] distancing himself from the group days after it launched, saying that he did not realise its political positions would be aligned with those of the US organisation, which he opposes. [23] [24] He contributed opinion pieces to The Telegraph between 2019 and 2021. [25] In 2019, at the age of 22, he became the youngest panellist to appear on a regular edition of the topical debate programme BBC Question Time . [26] [27]
In 2021, Harwood joined GB News as its political correspondent. [28] In August 2021 it was announced that he would host a new programme on the channel, The Briefing: AM with Tom Harwood. [29] Harwood was promoted to deputy political editor of GB News in March 2023. [30]
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