The two front-runners for the Conservative leadership position have criticised their rivals for promising to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) as the race intensifies with just days to go before the first MPs are chosen to withdraw.
Shadow Communities Secretary Kemi Badenoch and Shadow Home Secretary James Cleverley rejected the idea of withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights on Monday, despite calls from some colleagues to do so.
The former cabinet colleagues began campaigning less than a mile from each other in central London on the busiest day yet of the Conservative leadership campaign, which will narrow the field to five, and possibly four, candidates on Wednesday.
Speaking at a glitzy launch event in central London, Mr Badenoch described the immigration policies pushed by his rivals Robert Jenrick and Tom Tugendhat and a pledge to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights as “the easy answer”.
Many on the party's right wing have criticised the European Court of Human Rights for blocking plans to forcibly return asylum seekers to Rwanda.
“When David Cameron's government came into power we had a cap of tens of thousands of people,” she said. “Rather than just say we're going to make another promise, we need to ask ourselves why that didn't work.”
She added: “It's not just a matter of putting out numbers and targets. There is something wrong with the system. Those who put out numbers and say we will withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights are just giving easy answers.”
Less than an hour later, Mr Cleverley backed his position, though in less aggressive language: “It was not the European Court of Human Rights that stopped a plane from taking off just before I became Home Secretary. It was the UK Supreme Court that stopped a plane from taking off.”
He added: “The simple fact is that if we want quick answers and quick fixes, the British people will look to us and say they've heard this before.”
Cleverley was accused of making a pitch for the Conservative leadership election in the Commons after telling MPs that Labour was giving the impression it was taking the violence perpetrated by some protesters less seriously than this summer's rioters.
Echoing claims of “dual policing”, the shadow home secretary came under fire for suggesting Prime Minister Keir Starmer might be “devaluing some types of violence over others”.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said Mr Cleverley's comments “sounded more like an appeal to Conservative members in the middle of a leadership election than a serious response to the scale of chaos we are seeing and the need for a serious police response”.
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In his media appeal, the day before the six candidates address Conservative MPs at a crucial election campaign in Westminster, Mr Jenrick argued that withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights was the only way to quickly remove asylum seekers.
“There is no consensus in Europe on how to reform,” he told reporters. “All we agree on is that any attempt at reform would be a decades-long project, and I'm not convinced we have the time for that.”
He said Britons wanted to stop people arriving across the Channel and “we would not forgive the Conservative government if we wasted years renegotiating the terms of our membership of the European Convention on Human Rights”.
There is an expectation among many Conservative MPs that the first vote to narrow the field will eliminate Shadow Pensions Secretary Mel Stride and possibly former Home Secretary Priti Patel as well.
If one candidate is sure to be eliminated in Wednesday's first vote, and a second could be eliminated if the percentage of MPs is particularly low, then another vote will take place next Monday, narrowing the field down to four candidates.
The candidates will announce their slate at the Conservative Party conference starting on September 29, after which the final two names will be announced as party members.
A source in Jenrick's camp said they had a “foolproof path” to winning enough support to make it to the final two. Other Conservative MPs have said they believe Jenrick, Badenoch and Tugendhat, who hold their official campaign launch event on Tuesday, are the most likely to make it.
During the event, Badenoch mainly spoke for the right wing of his party, despite his comments on the European Convention on Human Rights, saying the previous Conservative government “talked from the right but governed from the left”.
Asked for an example, she pointed to setting targets to achieve net zero: “We all want to have a better environment, but setting laws and targets without thinking about how to get there is, in my opinion, a reliance on regulation rather than innovation,” she said.
Badenoch drew on his reputation as a politician whose outspokenness can be perceived as aggressive by some colleagues, talking about his training as an engineer and saying they were people who “see the world as it is”.
She said: “I refuse to fake it. I can be charming at times, but I think life is better when people say what they think.”
Meanwhile, Mr Cleverley appeared to take aim at Mr Badenoch's reputation for picking fights on the platform formerly known as Twitter, saying: “In politics it's really easy to use the most offensive language. If you're chasing clicks and likes on social media, that's the way to get ahead.”
