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Robert Jenrick has hit back at claims from his rivals that he is looking for “easy answers” in saying he would call for leaving the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR).
The former home office minister, who resigned from Rishi Sunak’s government because he thought that the prime minister was too soft on the controversial Rwanda scheme, has emerged as the leading candidate for the Tory right-wing.
He has claimed that “reforming the ECHR” would take decades and that if voters gave the Tories another chance to fix immigration they “will not give us another chance” if the party failed again.
And he said his experience of travelling across Europe had led him to believe leaving the convention was the right move for the country.
But his hard right plan for leaving the ECHR, which is aimed at winning back voters from Nigel Farage and Reform UK, has been dismissed by two of his rivals.
Former home secretary James Cleverly, who oversaw the Rwanda deportation legislation, argued that it was not the ECHR that blocked Rwanda flights but the UK Supreme Court.
He made a point of putting “delivery over rhetoric” in his leadership pitch to the party.
Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch, who was seen as Mr Jenrick’s biggest rival on the right, said he was “just looking for easy answers”.
But Mr Jenrick, who has insisted he is “nailed on” to get to the final two for Tory members to choose from, said: “On immigration, I’ve been very, very clear to people about what my view is. I think that we begin to bring back the millions of voters we lost to Reform by immediately, this autumn, being clear about where we stand.
“On legal migration that is a cap set by parliament in the tens of thousands.
“On illegal migration … if you come here illegally, you’re detained, you’re removed within days either back to Albania or to a safe third country like Rwanda, whatever is available in the years ahead.
“To do that, I have come to the conclusion that we have to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. I don’t believe it’s reformable. I don’t say this from a particularly ideological perspective, although I do believe in the sovereignty of parliament. I do it from having travelled across Europe.
“There is no consensus within Europe about how to reform it. 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 public are demanding action on this they are aghast at what is happening in the English Channel, and if we were lucky enough to re-enter government, the public would not give us a third chance if we then wasted years and years in an attempt to renegotiate our terms, which would be as doomed to fail as David Cameron’s attempt to renegotiate our membership of the European Union.”
