Rishi Sunak’s Cabinet, in its entirety, knew that the Rwanda Bill would not work, Robert Jenrick has claimed.
The Tory leadership hopeful said on Tuesday night that every minister “turned a blind eye” to weaknesses in the Bill, which was intended to deport asylum seekers to the east African country.
No one was ever deported under the scheme apart from four migrants who went to Rwanda voluntarily.
Mr Jenrick resigned as immigration minister in December last year because measures he had proposed to strengthen the Bill were rejected by Mr Sunak.
He told Sky News: “There was a choice for me at the time: take a Bill through Parliament which I knew didn’t work and which, frankly, everyone in Cabinet knew didn’t work; or leave the government and make the case in Parliament, where I was honest with myself and with the public.”
Mr Jenrick was then asked to clarify whether everyone in the Cabinet, which included Mr Sunak and then-home secretary James Cleverly, believed it would fail.
“I think everybody involved in that decision knew perfectly well that that policy was not going to succeed, but they turned a blind eye to it,” he said.
“I wasn’t willing to be a minister like that.”
Mr Jenrick quit as immigration minister after losing battles to strengthen the Rwanda Bill and push through a full package of reforms to reduce record net migration.
He predicted that the Tories would face the “red-hot fury of voters at the ballot box” if they did not do more to bring down historically high levels of immigration.
The Rwanda scheme had first been announced by Boris Johnson’s government in 2022.
But it faced a series of legal challenges brought by human rights lawyers which prevented any deportations taking place.
These included the overruling of Britain’s Supreme Court by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in June 2022.
Mr Jenrick has vowed to quit the ECHR if he defeats Kemi Badenoch to become Tory leader.
The Rwanda Bill was eventually passed in April this year during the general election campaign, and Mr Sunak promised that the first deportation flights would take off after a Conservative victory.
But in July it was killed off on the first day of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Government.
Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, has since claimed that £700 million was spent on the scheme despite only four migrants voluntarily being sent to Kigali.
She told MPs that the Tories had budgeted to spend more than £10 billion over six years on the deal with the east African country.
Mr Cleverly, the shadow home secretary, accused Ms Cooper of using “made-up numbers”.
