Kemi Badenoch has told GB News she will ensure the UK “leave the ECHR” after the murder of asylum hotel worker Rhiannon Whyte.

Speaking to the People’s Channel, the Conservative leader assured she will “toughen up” on illegal migration following the 27-year-old’s “horrific murder” by Sudanese national Deng Majek.

Speaking exclusively to Britain’s News Channel earlier today, Rhiannon’s mother Siobhan said Sir Keir Starmer has “blood on his hands”, adding she and her family will “not give up” on campaigning for justice for her.

Ms Whyte said: “I am angry at Keir Starmer and the Government for allowing this to happen. There’s so many cases that are brushed under the carpet, and we have sat quiet for 15 months for Rhiannon’s sake because I wanted justice.

“Starmer needs to be held accountable. If it was his family, if it was Sadiq Khan’s family, this wouldn’t happen. This needs to stop. There’s cases of poor men, poor children, women being raped, attacked, beaten, murdered on a daily basis.”

Reacting to Rhiannon’s murder and Ms Whyte’s claim that “no politician” reached out to her in the events that followed, Mrs Badenoch told GB News: “Of course I would speak to her, and I’d like the opportunity to. I think what she has suffered is absolutely horrific.

“It is our job as politicians to make sure that the laws in our country are enforced, and people who are not supposed to be here are deported, taken away, and never arrive in the first place, and the system has failed her. I think that this is something which we need to address.”

Making clear she has “changed her immigration policy” to make it “tougher” on illegal migration, she explained: “It is why I have changed our immigration policy made it much tougher. Let’s leave the ECHR, because we’re not able to deal with so many of these issues while we are in that convention.

“We need to be deporting all foreign criminals, and we need to do right by a lot of people who’ve been failed by the system.”

Pushing back on Mrs Badenoch’s pledge, GB News host Miriam Cates argued that the previous Conservative Government could have “waited a little longer” to call the general election, in order to get the Rwanda scheme up and running.

The Tory leader responded: “I can’t do hindsight, we don’t know exactly what would have happened depending on the date of the election. What we do know is that the Rwanda plan was a plan that needed to have been tried. Labour did not have to scrap that plan.

“We’d already spent nearly £1billion getting it ready, so that people who wanted to claim asylum would be processed in a third country and would never have arrived on UK shores. So it’s not about the timing of the election, it is about Labour scrapping something which could have worked and which I believe would have worked just for political reasons, because they didn’t want to do it, because it was a Conservative plan.”

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She said: “And now the Rwandan Government, I’m sure you would have seen over the weekend is suing the Labour Government for what looks like breach of contract.

“Labour are a mess again and again and again. They’ve got no plans, no idea what they’re doing, all they care about is if it’s a Conservative thing, they will not do it. They cannot assess whether something is good or bad and that is why they’re in such a mess.”

Questioned on Lord Peter Mandelson’s exit from the Labour Party in light of fresh allegations resurfaced in the Epstein files, Mrs Badenoch said he should “lose his peerage” as a result.

She said: “I think that people who commit crimes should not be allowed to stay in the House of Lords. If he has been proved to have committed crimes, then yes, I think we need to look at these peerages for life, where people can get away with staying in the Lords even though they’ve been convicted of crimes.

“MPs are not able to do so, so I think that that’s something that should be looked at for life peerages as well.”

In a statement, a Home Office spokesman told GB News: “The murder of Rhiannon Whyte was an abhorrent crime, and our thoughts are with her loved ones.

“This vile criminal is behind bars where he belongs, and he has rightly received the strictest punishment of a life sentence.

“We share the public’s anger about the broken asylum system and hotels, that is precisely why we are doing everything we can to keep dangerous offenders out of the country and close down hotels.”