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 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 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 ran 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]

• Tom Harwood in The Telegraph
• Tom Harwood at IMDb