Robert Jenrick… really?

It seems that a majority of Conservative MPs actually think that Robert Jenrick should be their next party leader. He has come out on top in each round of the leadership contest so far, repeatedly seeing off the other proverbial bald men battling over the Tory comb.

Jenrick is widely seen as a dead cert to be one of the final two candidates to be put to a ballot of party members. There is a genuine chance – especially if Tory MPs engineer the elimination of members’ favourite, Kemi Badenoch, before the final ballot – that Jenrick will soon be the leader of His Majesty’s Opposition.

Admittedly, there’s not a lot of political ‘talent’ on the Tory benches, especially since the General Election left them with just 121 MPs. But is Jenrick really the best the Tories can come up with? To those of us outside the Conservative fold, he seems a baffling choice.

Up until early last year, most voters would have struggled to pick Jenrick out of a police line-up. You might vaguely remember his two-year stint as housing secretary under Boris Johnson. Perhaps some faintly recall the Newark MP appearing at a few of the Covid press conferences. Then there was his low-level scandal back in 2020, over his unlawful granting of planning permission to porn baron Richard Desmond. Beyond that, Jenrick has barely registered as a political presence.

There was a good reason for this. Jenrick has long been seen as little more than a composite political careerist, a vapid Tory Boy. His own colleagues dubbed him ‘Robert Generic’. He looked and sounded like so many others populating the Palace of Westminster. His background was typical, from private education and reading history at Cambridge to a few years as a commercial lawyer.

Plus, while Jenrick has staked a claim in this Tory leadership race to be the ‘right-wing candidate’, inveighing against mass immigration and pledging to leave the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights, this all seems to be a pretty recent conversion – if indeed it is sincere at all.

When Jenrick entered parliament in 2014, aged 32, his political outlook was unremarkably managerialist, with nary a hint of principle. In the words of former Tory MP Anna Soubry, he was a ‘full-fat subscriber to David Cameron’, trimming ‘his sails to suit whichever political wind is blowing within the Conservative Party’. One Tory special adviser described him as a ‘parody-level Cameroon blandy’ who appealed to ‘Christian centrist dads’.

While he is now posing as a Eurosceptic, Jenrick naturally voted Remain in 2016. Then, along with Rishi Sunak and Oliver Dowden, he penned an op-ed in 2019, backing Boris Johnson for leader and hailing him as the embodiment of ‘One Nation’ values. This was a boost for Johnson, given the young, centrist pedigree of the three MPs, who were all elected in either 2014 or 2015.

Insubstantial, pragmatic but personally ambitious, Jenrick quietly climbed the ministerial rungs. Johnson appointed him housing secretary in 2019 before sacking him in 2021. Liz Truss then brought him back in as health minister in 2022. Rishi Sunak – who remained a close ally of Jenrick – later installed him as immigration minister.

The rationale for this latter appointment was, by all accounts, to keep an eye on right-wing home secretary Suella Braverman. Or, in the words of one Tory strategist, to ‘make sure she didn’t do anything too stupid’. In November 2022, Jenrick pushed back when Braverman described the small-boats crossings she herself was failing to tackle as an ‘invasion’ – a shrill, ugly phrase that was then rather popular on the more bellicose sections of the right. ‘It’s not a phrase I’ve used’, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme at the time.

Just a few months later, something changed. Jenrick was suddenly decrying legal and illegal migration, arguing that those crossing in small boats threatened to ‘cannibalise the compassion’ of the British people. He announced at the despatch box that he had actually wanted to reduce net migration, but was essentially blocked from doing so. In November 2023, Jenrick resigned, issuing an extravagant condemnation of Sunak’s government and its failure to implement the Rwanda policy, under which illegal migrants would be resettled in the central African nation.

Jenrick claims his metamorphosis over the past year and a half, from ‘centrist’ careerist into a wannabe hero of the Tory right, was born of conviction, ‘hardened’ by his experience working at the ‘woke’ Home Office. But it is hard to dislodge the suspicion that Jenrick, anticipating the Tories’ widely expected electoral defeat, was positioning himself for a run at the party leadership. A suspicion heightened by the Ozempic-fuelled glow-up he underwent after stepping down from the cabinet.

Migration, national identity, the tyranny of the ECHR. All of these are crucially important issues, on which the Tories have manifestly failed (and quite often misled) voters. But even if we take Jenrick at his word, that he has had some Damascene conversion on these issues, he seems hell-bent on tackling them in an unserious, hyperbolic fashion – aimed more at the right-wing commentariat than voters.

Hence, the attention-grabbing gestures rather than serious solutions during his time in government. He has at times leaned into a kind of performative mean-spiritedness, such as his decision in July 2023 to have murals of Mickey Mouse and Baloo the Bear removed from the walls of an asylum centre for unaccompanied children – on the grounds they were ‘too welcoming’. Jenrick seems to buy into a caricature, shared by Guardianistas and the more fulminating right-wingers alike, that ordinary people are not simply concerned about migration and our broken asylum system, but are virulently anti-migrant.

If the Conservative Party truly believes that Robert Jenrick – this political chameleon; this substance- and charisma-free zone – is the man that the British masses are waiting for, it is even more deluded than we realised.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.