PRIME MINISTER SHOULD NOT GO ON HOLIDAY ‘WHILST PARTS OF BRITAIN ARE BURNING’ SAYS ROBERT JENRICK

FORMER immigration minister Robert Jenrick has said that the Prime Minister should not be thinking of going on holiday “whilst parts of Britain are burning”.

The Conservative Party leadership candidate also condemned rioters as “yobs” and “morons” and said they deserve to be sentenced to long jail terms.

In a discussion with Camilla Tominey on GB News, he said: “I think it would be completely wrong for the Prime Minister to go on holiday whilst parts of Britain are burning.

“I’m sure that the Government, like the whole country, sees the severity of this situation. I know that they’re trying to get a grip on it and I welcome some of the measures they’ve already taken, like having more prosecutors, having the courts sit at weekends, but this is a very serious situation.

“We need the Prime Minister to be leading the country. The police need our full support and they need to know that he is there supporting them, making sure that this situation has been handled from the very top.”

He added: “I’m appalled by what’s happening across the country right now. You’ve got some far-right thugs, you’ve got groups of yobs, morons joining in marauding around the streets smashing up shops, attacking communities attacking a mosque, in one case.

“This isn’t Great Britain, it’s anti-British. We are a civilised, decent country.

“Then you’ve got these retaliatory mobs as well, smaller scale, from those communities out on the streets brandishing knives, bats, weapons. We’ve got to get a grip on this.

“We need to back the police to the hilt so that they can restore order to our streets and these people should be arrested. They should go to jail for a very long time. We’ve got to get order…

“There are some far-right people involved in this, absolutely. We must ensure that this is policed even-handedly and the police and politicians should be calling out whoever is responsible for this from whatever quarter and the police must be seen to be doing so fairly.”

He was also asked about the Tory leadership contest and said that he regretted voting Remain in the EU referendum: “I think it was a mistake, with hindsight.

“I think today, more than ever, now that it is clear that we are living in an age of mass migration, and this is going to be one of the defining issues of our time, that we need to secure our borders.

“The good thing about Brexit is that for the first time in my lifetime, we have control of the levers of migration…but we pulled them in the wrong direction immediately after the referendum.

“Ministers at the time made serious mistakes. I’ve said that, I’ve been clear and have been painfully honest about that. Now we’ve got to repent for those mistakes and do something fundamentally different.”

He added: “I’ve always been on the right of British politics, I’ve always been a Eurosceptic. I was very concerned about British sovereignty. I did in the end decide to vote remain because I was concerned about some of the disruption.

“I’ve always been on the economic right of the Conservative Party and every job that I’ve done, I’ve tried to slash red tape.”

Asked what tax he would cut if he became leader of the party, Jenrick said: “I will have to think carefully about that in the years ahead. But the things that I feel very frustrated about today are stamp duty, which is a bad tax, which is making it hard for people to move home, to downsize.

“I think the overall tax burden is far too high and so Income Tax thresholds need to start going up with inflation…taxes are too high, growth is too low and I want to make the UK a more competitive economy again.”

On who he wanted to win the US presidential election: “Well, it’s not it’s not for me to say. If I were an American citizen, I would be voting for Donald Trump.”