Robert Jenrick has vowed to deport around one million illegal immigrants if he wins the Conservative Party leadership contest and if they are voted back into power at the next General Election.

Seen as now being on the right of the party, he has also pledged to bring back the ill-fated Rwanda scheme to process asylum seekers in the African country, which was intermediately scrapped by Labour once it got into power in July.

It had only just been approved following a string of legal battles.

Mr Jenrick has revealed a hard-line stance on immigration and human rights laws that has seen him more aligned with Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, and more than fellow centrist Tories.

He has made a pledge to remove all illegal immigrants from the country which would mean about one million people having to be deported.

In terms of legal migration, he is promising a new annual cap to be set in the tens of thousands, after the net population grew by about one million in the last two years.

A similar pledge was made by David Cameron in 2010, but the Tories got nowhere near the target and net migration continued to balloon.

Due to a current reliance on foreign workers for several industry sectors, this would require British businesses to use British workers for vegetable and fruit, clean offices, and work in the care sector.

This could be done by boosting wages for such jobs by at least £1 an hour, he said.

The former Remainer has also said leaving the European Convention of Human Rights (EHRC), is central to his campaign.

He insisted rival candidate Kemi Badenoch’s proposal, to try to “reform” the European court was a “fantasy”.

This view further aligns him with Farage, who this week posted on X in a video that we must leave the EHRC after it prevented the UK from kicking out an Albanian criminal because of his human rights.

Mr Jenrick told the Daily Mail: “I share the anger and the frustration of the British public that this issue has not been taken seriously by politicians of all political stripes for most of my adult lifetime.

“And I am particularly frustrated that after we took back control of the levers of legal migration, upon leaving the European Union and ended freedom of movement, the ministers at the time made decisions which created a migration system even more liberal and open than the one we had.”

It appeared to be a swipe at Priti Patel and Boris Johnson, whose post-Brexit visa system, added to by refugees from Ukraine and Hong Kong, saw net immigration rise 764,000 in 2022.

He denied his focus on immigration made him a one-trick-pony, with new policies on the NHS, defence and the economy.

He said: “On each of those issues, I have brought forward serious policy solutions. I don’t talk in platitudes. I’ve brought forward serious answers.

“(For the NHS) it is ‘time to stop treating it as a religion to be worshiped, but as a public service in need of reform.

“It is a disgrace to say that 90 percent of NHS trusts failed to remove a single manager for poor performance last year. It’s incredible. Name a business in this country that operates that way?”

He pledged to use large amounts of foreign aid spending to grow military budgets to three percent of GDP.

Jenrick said his time in government “did shape my politics, because I saw that the British state was just not performing its most basic duty, which is to secure our borders, keep people safe, and I concluded that I was not prepared to be just another minister or politician who would turn a blind eye to those problems.”

Now just Mr Jenrick and Mrs Badenoch remain in the leadership contest after the shock ousting of favourite James Cleverley two days ago.

He said: “It could go either way. But people have been drawn to our campaign because we have a proper diagnosis of what’s gone wrong, and we’ve got real exciting, compelling policy arguments as to how we take the country and the party forward. I think the momentum is with me.”

Mrs Badenock’s battle is based on a pledge to reform the party under a “Renewal 30” banner – saying that is the first year they can be back in power.

She says on the Renewal 30 banner website: “In Government, we lost sight of what conservatism is. We talked right, but governed left. We thought we could just be managerially better than the other side. We forgot who we are and what we were winning for.”