Thomas Hedley Fairfax Harwood is a British journalist, activist, and political commentator. He is the senior reporter for the conservative political news websiteGuido Fawkes. He has written for The Daily Telegraph since 2019.
Early life and education
Harwood was born on 26 August 1996 in Cambridge, England. His father is a partner at a property consultancy, and his mother is a primary school teacher. He has a sister. Harwood attended The Perse School, an independent school in Cambridge. He studied politics at St Mary's College, Durham where he was also the president of the Durham Union Society. Harwood ran a successful satirical campaign to become a National Union of Students 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. He was elected in a landslide victory that gained national attention in December 2016. After his election, he appeared on the BBC's Daily Politics show. He later ran for the presidency of the NUS in 2017 with a similar campaign and was endorsed by the University of Manchester Students' Union. The union was the only one to hold a primary election in which students could vote for their candidate. Their vote mandated their delegates to vote for him in the NUS presidential election. He finished a distant third in the election, with 35 votes out of the 1,200 NUS delegates. In the following year, Harwood ran another satirical campaign to lower the voting age to twelve.
Career
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. In 2017, he worked for the Americanlibertarian organisation Students for Liberty. In May 2018, 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. Harwood received 336 votes, and finished in 6th place. Harwood became a reporter for the conservative political news website Guido Fawkes in July 2018. He was listed in talk radio station LBC's list of top 100 most influential Conservatives of 2019. Harwood was briefly a member of Turning Point UK, an offshoot of the US right-wing student organisation Turning Point USA, distancing himself from the group days after it launched. He has written articles for the newspaper The Daily Telegraph since May 2019. Harwood has appeared as a political commentator on Good Morning Britain, Newsnight, BBC Breakfast and Question Time. In 2020, he was listed in the Tatler "New Power Networkers" list.
Views
Harwood had advocated an uncompromising Brexit negotiating stance, favouring a comprehensive free trade agreement with the EU whilst stating that a no deal outcome with the European Union offers opportunities to the UK. He believes in a "deregulated, low tax, high wage UK" and has expressed support for "liberal democracy". He has opposed reducing the voting age to 16, arguing "responsibilities and rights" should go together. Harwood has supported the Black Lives Matter movement, arguing "it is wrong to depict the broader movement as simply another offshoot of Momentum". He has also opposed the proliferation of quangos.
