Two frontrunners to be Conservative party leader have criticised their rivals’ promises to leave the European court of human rights (ECHR) as the contest turns combative with days to go until the first MP is eliminated.
Kemi Badenoch, the shadow communities secretary, and James Cleverly, the shadow home secretary, both rejected the idea of leaving the ECHR on Monday despite calls from some of their colleagues to do so.
The former cabinet colleagues were launching their campaigns less than a mile from each other in central London on the busiest day yet of the Tory leadership campaign, which will be narrowed down to five candidates, and potentially to four, on Wednesday.
Speaking at a glitzy launch event in central London, Badenoch described migration targets and pledges to leave the ECHR – both of which have been pushed by her rivals Robert Jenrick and Tom Tugendhat – as “easy answers”.
Many on the right of the party blame the ECHR for scuppering their plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.
“We had a cap of tens of thousands when David Cameron came in,” she said. “We need to ask ourselves why didn’t that work, rather than just saying we’ll make another promise.”
She added: “It’s not just about throwing out numbers and throwing out targets. Something is wrong with the system. People who are throwing out numbers and saying they will leave the ECHR and so on are giving you easy answers.”
Less than an hour later, Cleverly backed her stance, albeit in less combative language. “The ECHR is not the body that stopped the planes taking off just before I became home secretary. It was the UK supreme court which stopped those planes taking off.”
He added: “The simple fact is, if you’re trying to grab shorthand answers, quick fixes, the British people will look at us and say we’ve heard that before.”
Cleverly was accused of making a pitch for Tory leadership votes in the Commons after telling MPs that Labour had given the impression of treating violence from some protesters less seriously than this summer’s rioters.
Echoing claims of “two tier policing”, the shadow home secretary was heckled as he suggested the prime minister, Keir Starmer, may have taken “some forms of violence less seriously than other forms of violence”.
Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, said Cleverly’s comments “sounded an awful lot more like a pitch to Tory party members in the middle of a leadership election than it did a serious response to the scale of the disorder that we saw and the need for a serious policing response”.
In his own media pitch, a day before the six candidates address Conservative MPs in a crucial hustings event in Westminster, Jenrick insisted that withdrawal from the ECHR was the only way to remove asylum seekers at speed.
“There is no consensus within Europe about how to reform it,” he told reporters. “The only thing that everyone agrees on is that any attempt to reform it would be a project of decades and I just do not think that we have time to do that.”
The British public, he said, wanted to stop people arriving across the Channel and would not forgive the Conservatives “if we then wasted years and years in an attempt to renegotiate our terms” of ECHR membership.
The expectation among a number of Tory MPs is that the first votes to whittle down the number of candidates will see Mel Stride, the shadow pensions secretary, eliminated, and possibly also Priti Patel, the former home secretary.
The initial vote on Wednesday will definitely eliminate one candidate, and could see a second depart if their share of MPs is particularly low. If not, another vote next Monday would reduce the field to four.
This field would then present themselves at the Conservative conference, which begins on 29 September, before a final two names are put to party members.
A source in Jenrick’s campaign said they have “an absolute nailed-on route” to getting enough support to reach the final two. Other Tory MPs say they think the most likely final two will come from Jenrick, Badenoch and Tugendhat, who has his formal campaign launch event on Tuesday.
During her event, Badenoch made her pitch mostly to the right of the party, despite her ECHR comments, saying the previous Tory government had “talked right but governed left”.
Asked for an example of this, she cited the imposition of targets to reach net zero. “We all want to deliver a better environment, but creating legislation and a target without working out how we were going to do it, in my view, was trusting regulation rather than innovation,” she said.
Leaning into her reputation as a politician whose plain-spokenness can, according to some colleagues, come across as abrasive, Badenoch talked about her training as an engineer, saying these were people who “see the world as it truly is”.
She said: “I refuse do to spin. I do charm sometimes, but I think life is better when people say what they think.”
Cleverly, meanwhile, appeared to take aim at Badenoch’s reputation for picking fights on X, formerly known as Twitter, saying: “It’s really easy to use the most aggressive language when we’re in politics. If you’re chasing clicks and likes on social media, that’s the way forward.”
