Jenrick for leader? The Tory right has lost the plot

It was former leader William Hague who once described the Tories as ‘an absolute monarchy tempered by regicide’. Kemi Badenoch’s relatively weak start as Conservative Party leader, although no worse than both successful and unsuccessful leaders of the opposition, has prompted yet another round of plotting. Fear of Reform UK’s rise has provoked her detractors into spasms of apoplexy. ‘Something must be done!’, they say, assuming the quick fix of a change of leadership would repair the immense damage done to the Conservative brand after a botched 14 years in government.

Step forward, Robert Jenrick. Yes, the man who Badenoch comprehensively defeated among Tory MPs and members less than six months ago is apparently the answer to the party’s woes. The leadership manoeuvres have been ostentatious and overt. He has the haircut, the Ozempic, the palpable hunger for the Tory crown. He has penned columns in the Telegraph that stray well beyond his brief as shadow justice secretary. His social-media activity, including slickly produced videos and Led By Donkeys-style stunts, is hyperactive. Jenrick has dived into the culture war with both feet, tweeting and writing articles defending Britain’s Christian heritage. He recently berated No10 for failing to tweet about ‘Psalm Sunday’ (even though the actual Christian holiday is ‘Palm Sunday’).

Jenrick’s allies have been sharpening their knives. Young, right-wing edgelords and Sensitive Young Men are swooning over their champion. The man once derided as ‘Robert Generic’ has been declared ‘The Tories’ saviour’ by the Critic and was depicted on a recent front cover as a knight in shining armour. Many on the Very Online right have talked themselves into this delusion. And it appears as if the shadow justice secretary – not a stupid man by any stretch – seems to have joined the collective hallucination. (Few will have been convinced by his declaration of loyalty to Badenoch last week.)

Let’s look at the record of this supposed saviour of the Tory right. In 2014, Jenrick entered parliament as, in the words of one Tory adviser, a ‘parody-level Cameroon blandy’. Or in the words of his former ally and mentor, former arch-Remoaner Tory MP Anna Soubry, a ‘full-fat subscriber to David Cameron’. He won the Newark by-election in 2014 by urging Labour and Lib Dem supporters to lend him their votes to stop the ‘extreme’ UKIP from winning. Commenting on his victory, the young Jenrick said: ‘You win elections at the centre.’ Two years later, in 2016, he campaigned for Remain alongside another mentor of his, Europhile Tory grandee Ken Clarke. Jenrick even signed a letter ahead of the EU referendum, along with 16 other MPs, denouncing ‘Farage’s Britain’ as ‘angry, intolerant, limited [and] sepia-coloured’.

Jenrick ended up supporting Boris Johnson’s bid for the Tory leadership in 2019. He wrote an op-ed with his friends, Rishi Sunak and Oliver Dowden, hailing Johnson as the embodiment of ‘One Nation’ values.

‘But people change’, a sceptic might say. True. One could list examples of countless politicians – from Margaret Thatcher and Tony Benn to Keith Joseph and Enoch Powell – whose politics changed over the years. It is perfectly normal, even healthy to a degree. Yet what is unusual about Robert Jenrick is the sheer speed of his conversion.

Only three years ago, in 2022, Jenrick supported his friend, Rishi Sunak, to be Tory leader. He was then offered the job of immigration minister by Sunak to keep an eye on the then home secretary, Suella Braverman – or in the words of one strategist, ‘To make sure she didn’t do anything too stupid’. Later that year, he publicly broke with Braverman when she described the small-boats crossings as an ‘invasion’. ‘I would never demonise people coming to this country in pursuit of a better life’, he said, warning that politicians should ‘choose [their] words very carefully’. Braverman claims that Jenrick told her, in 2023, that he was not in favour of leaving the European Convention on Human Rights. He resigned from government in 2023, citing Rishi Sunak’s weakness on the Rwanda policy. Although what is often left out of this story is that it followed a reshuffle in which he was not promoted.

A mere few months later, Jenrick stood for the Tory leadership posing as the right’s saviour. This is an incredible shift in position within an extraordinarily short space of time. Are we to seriously believe this is a result of his convictions? That Jenrick would also have resigned in 2023 ‘on principle’ had he been promoted to a senior cabinet job? Come off it.

If it were merely personal ambition underlying Jenrick’s flip-flopping, it would be far less troubling. The bigger problem is that he now seems to be playing up to a Guardianista caricature of the electorate he seeks to appeal to. Take his decision as immigration minister to have murals of Mickey Mouse removed from the walls of an asylum centre for unaccompanied children, reportedly on the grounds that they were too welcoming. More recently, he has warned that English identity is under threat from immigration. He has said colonised countries should be grateful to the British Empire. He has described grooming gangs as the product of ‘mass migration’ and of importing ‘alien cultures’, suggesting that some of the worst crimes in recent history can be pinned on entire demographics. The irony is that this comes from the same man who told young Tory activists during the leadership contest that he would not take his party down a ‘rabbit hole of culture wars’.

There is a clear difference between patriotism or wanting to control immigration and what Jenrick is flirting with. People want immigrants to integrate and Islamism to be dealt with. They want illegal immigration to stop and legal immigration to be controlled. But that does not mean they are xenophobes or are fearful of other cultures. There is also a difference between pushing back against the narrative that the West is the source of all the world’s ills, or that everything the British Empire did was evil, and completely ignoring the crimes of colonialism. There is a difference between opposing demands for ‘decolonisation’ or ‘reparations’ and implying that Africans should be grateful for being civilised by the white man. People have pride in their history and do not want to see statues pulled down or wanton attacks on their heritage. But that does not mean they do not recognise the sins of empire or think everything about our colonial past was without shame – they rightly take a nuanced view. It is concerning that Jenrick does not distinguish between these two positions.

A generous interpretation of Jenrick’s recent posturing is that he is fake but at least knows where the wind is blowing. That he does not truly understand the cultural conservatism of many voters, and so mimics a parody of it. That it’s all vibes and vice-signalling, nothing substantive. A less generous interpretation is that he is chasing an odd and increasingly radicalised fringe of the right, as he believes it would be good for his career.

The right’s excitement around Jenrick might be a bit more explicable if he were remotely popular with the broader public. But there is little evidence that he is. Ahead of last year’s Tory leadership election, More in Common held focus groups of voters who defected from the Conservatives at the General Election. Their view of Jenrick was clear: he was among the least popular of the candidates. Although some voters were attracted to some of his policies, he was perceived to be the wrong messenger. One participant in Great Yarmouth said that, ‘He was saying all the right things’, but also described him as ‘smug and smarmy’. ‘Slimey’, ‘not relatable’, ‘out of touch’, ‘creepy’, ‘wooden’ – these were the kinds of words that kept coming up in the focus groups, irrespective of whether voters had sympathy with some of his (latest) ideas. As Steven, a store manager from Welwyn, said: ‘[Jenrick] was saying all the right things but felt like an AI-generated script kind of thing. Just hey, what would make me sound popular?’

Voters like Steven have a better measure of the man than many within SW1 whose livelihoods depend on understanding politics. They clearly sense that Jenrick is a weathervane who twists in the wind, whose primary interest is his own self-advancement. After all, that explains his toadying to Cameron, his toadying to Boris, his resignation after failing to be promoted and his embrace of a politics that was antithetical to everything he stood for until about two minutes ago. Yet we are expected to believe he can be a more authentic exponent of right-wing politics than Nigel Farage? Reform voters will not be won over by someone who was a Tory wet until very recently, while the Lib Dem and Labour voters he once reached out to would likely be repelled by his current image.

If Jenrick really is the last great hope of the Tory Party, then it is in far deeper trouble than many realise.

Danny Okobi is a writer based in London.