Greater Lincolnshire's new Mayor calls for illegal migrants to be housed in tents and pours scorn over opponents

Reform UK’s Dame Andrea Jenkyns won convincingly the first-ever contest to be Mayor of the county.

After initially thanking her campaign staff and those involved in the election count, she launched into a venomous attack on her opponents, lambasting the campaign as the worst she has fought.

Dame Andrea also called for ‘illegal migrants’, or asylum seekers being processed, to be put up in tents instead of hotels. The trio of other candidates on the stage, Labour’s Jason Stockwood, Lincolnshire Independent, Marianne Overton, and Conservative Rob Waltham walked out during her speech.

“I say no to putting people in hotels,” Dame Andrea said in her speech, vowing Reform UK would tackle illegal migration. “Tents are good enough for France, they should be good enough for here in Britain.”

When asked by the BBC about the remarks in a subsequent press pool, Dame Andrea doubled down, and claimed: “I think that’s what the silent majority think.”

She added: “Illegal migrants, people who come here illegally, should be put in tents.

Meanwhile, Dame Andrea said, in recent weeks, she had “never experienced such negativity and soul-destroying campaigns against me like this one”.

She cited the challenge against her candidacy’s listed address validity among several claims of ‘dirty’ tactics by opponents. “The dirty tricks of the US politics I believe has now been imported here into Britain,” she said.

She also said, in an apparent reference to the Green Party’s Sally Horscroft: “The campaign was also filled with irony as one of the candidates stated I was parachuted in. She said it with her South African accent.” She defended this comment later in a press pool as irony.

Dame Andrea said, however, in her victory speech she would “draw a line under” the “dirty tricks” she claimed of her opponents.

Dame Andrea promised to “fight” for the people of Lincolnshire and concluded her victory speech: “I will keep your taxes low, I will work with you, with our industries, with our business, and with our young people.

“Together, it’s time to heal, we will deliver once in a generation change. I will lead with a sword of common sense and cut through wastage and bureaucracy.”