To Birmingham, where the Conservative party conference is in full swing. As well as the formal leadership hustings taking place this week, the four rivals vying for the top job are busy behind the scenes trying to convince their colleagues – and membership – to back them. Robert Jenrick staged his latest rally bright and early on Monday morning, treating attendees to breakfast, mountains of merchandise (including printed copies of the Jenrick Post) and the dulcet tones of, er, Avicii. But that wasn’t all – the Tory frontrunner couldn’t quite resist taking a pop at Sir Keir Starmer’s crowd either…
Launching into his speech, Jenrick blasted the rather gloomy attitude that underpinned the lefty lot’s Liverpool conference last weekend. ‘What a contrast to the Labour party conference the other day,’ he crowed. ‘That was a parade of the inadequate and the unserious. If anyone says the grown ups are back in charge in our country – just look at Ed Miliband.’ Ouch. The Tory leader continued on:
Then you’ve got David Lammy, our Foreign Secretary. He’s the one who went on Celebrity Mastermind and said that Henry VII succeeded Henry VIII. He’s not quite a celebrity, certainly not a mastermind, but he’s banging on about a ceasefire – and that’s just between Sue Gray and Morgan McSweeney.
Talk about pulling no punches, eh? And of course it wouldn’t be a proper Labour-bashing tongue-lashing without a nod towards the ongoing freebie fiasco…
And then you’ve got Angela Rayner. The first three months of this Labour government have been so bad they just had to go on holiday to Ibiza – and it’s so bad she’s actually had to pay for her own holiday.
Don’t hold back, Rob! After having his fun, the leadership candidate was quick to move onto the subject of the European Convention on Human Rights – on which he has the strongest stance of all his competitors. ‘Churchill would turn in his grave if he saw what had happened to this document today,’ the contender started. Then, in a Boris Johnson-esque tirade, Jenrick drew curious comparisons between his former leader’s Brexit rhetoric and his own plans for the ECHR. ‘It’s leave or remain,’ he advised his audience:
Remain means subject our people and our country to dangerous criminals on our streets, to terrorists on our streets, to a court creeping into every aspect of our lives without any democratic accountability. And it means that we never secure our borders. Leave means end this farce once and for all. I’m for leave… It’s leave or die for our party… Let’s leave the ECHR and let’s get this done.
How very interesting. Will emulating his former boss help Jenrick get closer to securing his own position as Tory party leader? Stay tuned…
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