Robert Jenrick made himself the leading candidate of the Tory right with a series of hardline policies designed to take on Nigel Farage’s Reform UK including bringing back the Rwanda plan.
The former home office minister and communities secretary was surrounded by leading figures from the Tory right including former minister Esther McVey, who introduced him at the launch, and Common Sense Group chairman Sir John Hayes.
In a pitch made directly to the Tory membership which many believe is more rightwing than the party’s MPs, Mr Jenrick promised to create a party “which my good friend Suella Braverman is comfortable in”.
The Newark MP chose his own constituency for the launch to prove that the party wants to reach out to the towns and countryside from “the metropolitan bubble” of London. But it was his collection of rightwing policies which set him apart from his rivals.
Mr Jenrick is currently up against former business secretary Kemi Badenoch, ex-home secretaries James Cleverly and Priti Patel, former work and pensions secretary Mel Stride, and former security minister Tom Tugendhat.
He told his audience that if he could lead the Tories back to power he would “absolutely” take Britain out of the ECHR.
At previous event in Essex last week he pledged not to try to bring Nigel Farage into the party but he was more circumspect at his launch.
Asked if the two Reform UK MPs Nigel Farage and Lee Anderson as well as Tory rightwinger Suella Braverman would “feel comfortable” in a Conservative party he led, Mr Jenrick said: “It will definitely be a party in which my good friend Suella Braverman is comfortable. I want to build a big church, a big tent for this party.
“But it has to be a strong tent. I want to ensure that we are a big church, that it has a common creed.
“So we have to believe in Conservative principles again. I never want to be going onto a doorstep in a general election in the future and people not know what our party stands for.
“That is the essence of my campaign. If a member in this room would put on a blue rosette under my leadership they would know what it stood for, and they would have pride in wearing it.”
Mr Jenrick has entered the race at the expense of Ms Braverman taking many of her supporters and the former home secretary, who easily topped polls among members for best option for leader, is yet to endorse any candidate having claimed MPs believe she is “too mad and bad” to be leader.
Mr Jenrick has made no secret that he moved from being a centrist to the right after serving as immigration minister in the Home Office claiming he found “a department in ashes” when he started the job. He resigned from rishi Sunak’s government because the then prime minister refused to go far enough clamping down on immigration numbers and on the flights to Rwanda.
Mr Jenrick insisted that under him the Tories would return to the target of less than 100,000 net migration a year.
Jenrick said he would be “open to” a cap restricting immigration to less than 10,000 people a year.
Asked to put a number on his proposed immigration cap, Mr Jenrick said: “I said that it would be in the tens of thousands. I’m open to it being less.
“But the key thing is that Parliament decides the cap and every Member of Parliament votes for it, so you can hold them to account.
“Do they believe in lower migration or not? And we can finally begin to restore public trust and confidence in our legal migration system.”
He added that he would “hope” to bring back the Rwanda scheme scrapped by the new Government, but this would be “four or five years away”.
The Tory leadership hopeful told the audience at his campaign launch: “Despite spending more money than ever before, too much of the British state simply wasn’t working. Nowhere exemplifies this challenge more than the NHS.”
Mr Jenrick took aim at spending and quangos in the health service, adding: “We allowed the lions on the frontline of the NHS to be let down by the donkeys in the back offices.”
He later said similar problems were faced by many western countries, but added: “The particular problems we face as a country stem from the fact that the British system is not working for the British people.
“I am not going to lie to you, for most of my time as a politician I believed our political system basically worked. I was elected 10 years ago in a by-election here in Newark, I was honoured to be a member of the government of each of the last five Conservative prime ministers. I prided myself on making the system work, on getting things done for my constituents and our country.”
While he pointed to his record as housing secretary on housebuilding and reducing homelessness, Mr Jenrick added: “In the last two years, I have come to see that a different approach is needed.”
Responding to Mr Jenrick’s Conservative Leadership campaign event, Liberal Democrat Deputy Leader, Daisy Cooper MP said: “As a minister, Robert Jenrick oversaw a housing crisis and failed to address immigration, he has a terrible record tainted by failure.
“Only in today’s Conservative Party could someone with such a terrible record of failure think they could lead it.
“Jenrick is now a symbol of the way the Conservative Party has moved further and further away from lifelong Conservative voters in the Blue Wall. People right across the country are instead putting their faith in the Liberal Democrats to get a fair deal for them.”