Kemi Badenoch Claims Tories Promising To Leave the ECHR Are Offering "Easy Answers"
4 min read
Kemi Badenoch accused people who are committed to leaving the European Convention of Human Rights of offering "easy answers" on illegal migration, as she launched her official campaign to replace Rishi Sunak as Conservative Party leader.
Badenoch, the shadow levelling up secretary, launched her campaign in central London on Monday to an audience including Tory MP supporters like Claire Coutinho — the former Cabinet minister who announced her support for Badenoch at the event.
High profile Conservative MPs Laura Trott, Alex Burgart and Andrew Griffith were also in attendance to hear Badenoch promise to "renew" the Conservative party.
Asked how she would deal with small boats bringing migrants to the UK, Badenoch said she would not make promises she could not keep and that there was no silver bullet for tackling illegal migration, describing leaving the ECHR as an "easy" answer to a difficult problem.
“People throwing out numbers and saying we’ll leave the ECHR are giving easy answers. That’s how we got in this mess in the first place,” she said.
The remarks are likely to be interpreted as a thinly-veiled swipe at Robert Jenrick, who along with Badenoch is currently seen as a frontrunner in the race to replace Sunak. Jenrick, the Conservative MP for Newak, has already said he would withdraw the UK from the convention as a way of stopping small boats crossing the Channel to reach the UK.
Badenoch and Jenrick are leading the way with public endorsements from Tory MPs at the time of writing. A source on the Jenrick campaign this morning claimed he was "nailed on" to make the final two.
She also said she was more worried by success of independent MPs who put support for Gaza at the heart of their recent General Election campaigns than she was about the rise of Nigel Farage's Reform UK.
"When everyone was talking about the five new MPs from Reform, I was far more worried about the five new MPs elected on the back of sectarian Islamist politics; alien ideas that have no place here. The sort of politics we need to defeat quickly," Badenoch said.
Badenoch is among six candidates who are in the running to replace Sunak following the Tory party's heavy general election defeat to Labour on 4 July. The other five are Jenrick, Tom Tugendhat, Priti Patel, James Cleverly, and Mel Stride.
Conservative MPs in the coming weeks will vote to whittle down this list of six candidates to a final two, with the party membership ultimately choosing the winner in early November.
At his own campaign launch on Monday, Cleverly set out his vision for a "low tax, low regulation" economy. The former home secretary announced a policies of a "one in, two out" approach to regulations, lifting defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP, and re-establishing the Rwanda scheme.
Kemi Badenoch launching her Tory leadership campaign in central London (Alamy)
In her speech on Monday morning, Badenoch said it was not good enough for the next Conservative leader to jut point out how "terrible Labour are", and promised that as leader she would "tell it like it is" to help the party rebuild.
"Truth is not relative. Those who know me best know that I don't do spin...
"Politics is better when we tell it like it is. Spin can only get you so far. Better to deal with hard truths today than big problems tomorrow," the former secretary of state for business and trade said.
Badenoch said her experience in Cabinet had shown her that whole system in government is "broken".
"A system that has evolved over recent decades to stop governments doing things they were elected to do. I would see a problem, try to fix it and be told 'Sorry minister, you can't do that'.
"People would ask for help. Ask me to intervene. And when I tried to, I was told: 'It's not a good look. Ministers should not get involved like that.' Well, I like to get involved."
She drew on her experience as an engineer, claiming it meant she was best equipped to fix the problems in government.
"Engineers are realists. We see the world as it truly is but we can also dream and plot a path from idea to reality. We don't make things better just by using words. There is little room for error in what we do," she said.
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