Once it was seen as the party’s inheritance from Winston Churchill. Now human rights are the Conservative Party’s bête noire and likely to feature in its next election manifesto as part of a populist stance against European interference What is going on in the Conservative Party with regard to human rights? The Tories have long had a respectable engagement with the idea, seeing in it a way of spreading democratic values and the rule of law abroad while reining in overweening bureaucracy and the “nanny state” at home. A pamphlet by The Daily Telegraph journalist Peter Oborne and Tory MP Jesse Norman has shown how the European Convention on Human Rights (agreed in 1950) was “Churchill’s legacy” to a Europe that was far more at risk from socia