Tom Tugendhat, in his bid to succeed Rishi Sunak as the next Conservative leader, has said he is ready to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights.
The former security minister is the second Conservative MP to announce his candidacy after former home secretary James Cleverley and appears to be appealing to the right to win the support of party members.
He is seen as the One Nation wing of the party and has previously warned against withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, but recent history shows that the Conservative grassroots tend to choose candidates from the far right.
Mr Tugendhat warned in October last year that withdrawing from the treaty could have implications for the Good Friday Agreement, the Windsor Treaty framework and decentralised administration.
“There are a lot of treaties in the world. If you want to withdraw from treaties, explain how you are going to address the gap that they create,” he said at the time. “This is a really big issue, and don’t start putting words on the table unless you can answer the question.”
However, writing in The Telegraph on Wednesday night, Tugendhat suggested he was prepared to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), saying that if ECHR institutions make it difficult to control the UK’s borders, the UK would need to “be exempt from those institutions” or “leave the jurisdiction of those institutions”.
He suggested this was a “common-sense Conservative position” and appeared to be trying to counter right-wing rivals Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, who are thought to want the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights.
He also moved to the right on other issues important to Conservative MPs, such as gender identity and net zero, and as a former army officer, he called for defence spending to be increased to 3% of GDP.
Tugendhat said the Conservative party suffered its historic election defeat because it had lost the trust of British voters by failing to deliver on promises to cut taxes and immigration.
He said the party could win the next election if it regained trust. “Wise people have already written millions of complicated words about why we lost the election, but I can explain it in one word: trust. We lost the trust of the British people because we did not deliver on the promises we made,” he wrote.
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“I’m not just running to be the next leader of the Conservative Party. I’m running to be the next Conservative Prime Minister. The aim of a leadership election is to win.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Victoria Atkins, the shadow health secretary and fellow moderate Conservative, also withdrew her candidacy.
The party announced a timeline for an extended leadership contest on Monday, with nominations due to close next week. Conservative lawmakers will narrow the field to four candidates in September and then pitch them to grassroots members at the party conference in October.
MPs will then narrow the field to two candidates for a party membership vote. In the last two leadership contests, Boris Johnson beat Jeremy Hunt and Liz Truss beat Rishi Sunak, who went on to become chancellor without a full election. Sunak will remain as caretaker leader until the results are announced on November 2.
