Credit;PA
Robert Jenrick has claimed that pensioners in Dover are waking up with illegal migrants in their bedrooms as he doubled down on his commitment to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
Speaking to Tom Swarbrick on LBC, the Tory leadership hopeful said his experience at the Home Office had been a formative one in which he saw the British state being unable to do its most basic duties”.
“If you had seen the things that I have seen”, he explained to Swarbrick, he too would want to leave the ECHR and revamp the Conservative’s ill-fated Rwanda plan.
Pressed on what those things were, Jenrick gave the example of pensioners waking up with illegal migrants in their bedrooms, which feels a little… fabricated.
Whether the UK should continue its 71-year membership of the ECHR emerged as a key dividing line between the candidates at the Tory Party’s annual conference in Birmingham.
Legal challenges filed under the convention grounded flights scheduled under the government’s failed Rwanda deportation scheme, which was later ruled unlawful by the UK’s Supreme Court and has now been scrapped by Labour.
MPs on the right of the party have increasingly blamed the convention for enabling failed asylum seekers to challenge their removal from the UK.
Jenrick, who topped the first two leadership ballots of Tory MPs, has put a pledge to leave the convention at the heart of his campaign to succeed Rishi Sunak as Conservative leader – a pledge which has not been echoed by his rivals.
