Suella Braverman has revealed she wanted to send asylum seekers to the Falkland Islands - but was thwarted by a lack of enthusiasm from the Foreign Office and military.
The former Home Secretary said she also proposed using Ascension Island and Saint Helena in the South Atlantic for "offshoring purposes". Ms Braverman, who was sacked by Rishi Sunak in November, said she was desperate to get thousands of people away from the UK mainland. She said sending them to British overseas territories could have been a solution.
During her tenure the asylum backlog hit a massive 175,000, with the system costing a massive £4billion - up from £500million a decade earlier. Ms Braverman claimed that moving people to territories where UK law is in place would prevent the stalemate which has bogged down the Rwanda scheme for the past two years.
The Tory backbencher - who has claimed Mr Sunak's latest Rwanda Bill won't work - told an online event hosted by the right-wing Popular Conservatives group that support within Whitehall "wasn't forthcoming".
She said: "One of the proposals I've put forward is for overseas territories to be used for our offshoring purposes. I was very much in favour of a temporary transit mechanism to use something like the Ascension Island or St Helena or even potentially the Falklands Islands as a way to get people out of the mainland, mainland UK and, you know, off the territory. But still where UK law applies."
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She went on: "So we wouldn't have some of these issues around the safety of a third country and we could either use these places as a temporary staging post and place to accommodate people whilst we sorted out Rwanda, or we could actually try and look for a longer term resolution.
"So I was very much in favour. It does require massive effort from the military, from the Foreign Office, you know, partnership really, and unfortunately it wasn't really forthcoming."
When the idea of sending asylum seekers to Ascension Island was mooted last year a Government source warned: "The RAF will want nothing to do with it.”
During the talk she described the Safety of Rwanda Bill - Mr Sunak's desperate attempt to get around a Supreme Court ruling that the project is unlawful - as "fatally flawed". The former Attorney General claimed it wouldn't achieve the Government's goal of shutting down legal challenges.
Ms Braverman, who previously voted against the Bill in the Commons, said: "It's fatally flawed. It doesn't go far enough. It still leaves far too many loopholes, far too many gaps which will be exploited by the claimant's lawyers."