Tom Harwood

Thomas Hedley Fairfax "Tom" Harwood (born August 1996) is a British political commentator, activist, and journalist. He is a senior reporter for the right-wing political news website, Guido Fawkes.

Harwood was born on August 1996 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England. His father is a partner at a property consultancy, and his mother is a primary school teacher. He has a sister. Harwood was privately educated at The Perse 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 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. 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.

Also while at university, Harwood ran the pro-Brexit campaign group Students for Britain, an arm of the official Brexit campaign organisation Vote Leave. In 2017, he worked for the American libertarian organisation Students for Liberty. Harwood became a reporter for the right-wing political blog Guido Fawkes in July 2018. In the same year, he was a Conservative Party candidate for the East Chesterton ward in the 2018 Cambridge City Council election. The ward had elected councillors from the Labour Party in the five previous elections with the Liberal Democrats candidate finishing in second place in each election, and was last represented by a Conservative in 1988. In the election, the two Labour candidates were elected. Harwood received 336 votes, and finished in 6th place.

He was listed in talk radio station LBC's list of top 100 most influential Conservatives of 2019. Harwood is a former member of Turning Point UK, an offshoot of the US right-wing student organisation Turning Point USA. He appeared prominently in their launch but days later distanced himself from the group. He has written articles largely supporting Boris Johnson and Brexit for the newspaper The Daily Telegraph since May 2019. Harwood has appeared as a political commentator on Good Morning Britain, Newsnight, and Question Time. In 2020, he was listed in the Tatler 'New Power Networkers' list.