Kemi Badenoch has refused to put a number on her preferred level of immigration as she rejected the politics of ‘easy answers’.

Launching her campaign to be Tory leader, she also insisted that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) would not solve the problem of securing Britain’s borders.

She admitted the previous Government, in which she served as a Cabinet minister, had talked like Conservatives but acted like Labour – including by setting a legal target to reach net zero by 2050 without knowing how to reach it.

Instead of ‘managerialist politics that wasn’t rooted in principles’, she vowed to govern the party according to her values of personal responsibility, equality, family and truth.

Mrs Badenoch was the surprise star of the 2022 Tory leadership race and after serving as Business Secretary and Equalities Minister under Rishi Sunak she is now the bookies’ favourite to replace him.

She was introduced by party grandee Lord Maude and ex Cabinet minister Claire Coutinho at her launch event yesterday [mon] with a dozen other MPs in the audience.

As the contest heats up, the frontrunner is likely to face attacks from her rivals over her stance on immigration, with Robert Jenrick calling for a legal cap to keep net migration below 100,000 a year, Tom Tugendhat in favour of the same level and James Cleverly saying it should be lower than 300,000.

Asked what she specific number she would propose, Mrs Badenoch replied: ‘I’m really glad you asked the migration question, because what you said shows and demonstrates quite well where things went wrong.

‘We had a cap of tens of thousands when David Cameron came in. We need to ask ourselves why didn’t that work rather than just saying, we’ll make another promise.

‘So it’s not just about throwing out numbers and throwing out targets. Something is wrong with the system. People who are throwing out numbers and saying, oh, leave the ECHR and so on, are giving you easy answers.’

She insisted she had been thinking about the issue however and suggested that part of the problem was that many Home Office staff had come from refugee charities.

And she claimed that even leaving the ECHR, which Mr Jenrick has called for and Mr Tugendhat has suggested he could support, would not be enough.

‘That’s why I don’t want to throw that promise out there. It’s another thing that we’ll end up doing that doesn’t actually solve the problem.’

However she also said that people should not feel guilty for questioning levels of immigration ‘if it is changing the place they know and love’ and that foreign criminals should be deported and locals given priority for housing if that’s what the public wants.

Mrs Badenoch said the ‘central failure of politics for 25 years, maybe even longer’ has been the failure to tell voters the truth.

And she said one of the ‘mistakes’ of the Tory administration had been that it ‘talked right but governed left, sounding like Conservatives but acting like Labour’.

In an apparent criticism of Mr Sunak’s policy of increasing free childcare for parents of two-year-olds, she said: ‘Sometimes government just doesn’t get family. It wants to help with childcare, not because it loves children but so that their mums can get back to work quickly. We need to celebrate families. We need to place them at the centres of our policies and our actions for the good of society, not for the good of the Treasury.’