Former Conservative minister Steve Baker has said he will be backing Kemi Badenoch to be the next leader of the Conservative Party.
Speaking on GB News Steve Baker said:
“I shall vote for Kemi and with a good heart too, because she’s authentic and she’s got a ferocious passion for what she believes.
“I think for a long time, the Conservative Party’s been all over the place because it’s kind of lacked an intellectual keel. It’s forgotten what it believed and followed polls rather than trying to lead them. And what Kemi does is she truly believes in conservative ideas, and she argues for them with great passion. And it’s that authenticity which for me tells me it should be Kemi.
“Leaving the ECHR is not itself the policy objective. The policy objective is to control immigration, and in particular, illegal migration.
“Now we might need to leave the ECHR, but the other European nations who are convention members have got similar problems, particularly Italy, for example, with people coming across the Med.
“So it ought to be possible to renegotiate. And let me tell you, as somebody who’s been a Northern Ireland Office Minister, we would have very considerable political difficulties, even if we could navigate the legal difficulties of extricating the convention from the Belfast Good Friday agreement.
“So it’s not trivial to do it. But also the other point is, in five years of a Labour government, I’d be very surprised if the ECHR is still the biggest issue when we go into the next general election.
“I think you’ll find that if Kemi wins, she controls migration. The idea that anyone could lead the Conservative Party into a general election without pledging to control migration and get the numbers down, that is fanciful.
“The Conservative Party’s cried wolf for too long, and that is one of the problems we’ve had. That’s one of the reasons why we earned the hiding that the electorate gave us. It’s got to be sorted out. And it’s going to be a long journey, tough journey, to persuade the public that this time we’re going to get numbers down.
“You’ve just got to manage what’s going on in your brain and make sure that you’re only taking on fights for which you’re well prepared. And that’s obviously what went wrong with the maternity pay.
“And yes, of course, you’ve got to better communicate well, but that, to me, is a problem that can be dealt with, but it’s a choice for her to just decide that she’s not going to do that anymore.
“But the thing for me, the thing you can’t fix in a politician is true belief. You know, they say there’s two kinds of politicians, the wind socks, who believe whatever they need to believe, depending which way the wind is blowing, and the signposts. And she’s a signpost.
“I would take Robert [Jenrick] at face value. He’s a good man, and I’d take what he says in good faith. And I’ve obviously known him since he was elected, and I hope I haven’t ever had a bad word to say about him.
“Obviously it’s true that he has shifted his position. But equally, if you can’t, in life, learn something and move what you believe, then really, you’re not on a journey like anyone ought to be.
“I have watched closely for 14 years as Tory leaders really haven’t believed with enough sort of conviction what they were doing, and the result is that the ship of state gets tossed about.
“So for me, Kemi is a true believer in solid conservative principles, somebody who wants renewal. She’s the person for me, and I will back her wholeheartedly.
“She’ll have to win voters back from Reform, but she’ll have to do more than that.
“She’ll have to win back Conservative voters who went to the Lib Dems or went to Labour. In somewhere like Wycombe almost half of my Conservative previous voters stayed at home in disillusionment.
“And people have got to come out, they’ve got to come back from the Lib Dems. It’s a very, very steep and tough road.”
