The harbinger

Not the title of a new slasher movie but this week's New Statesman.

Good evening. I have written this:

It’s a 5000-word look at Robert Jenrick, the ascendent politician on the British right, and the odds-on favourite to lead the Tory party into the next election.

I travelled with him to Birmingham – the centre of England and the “big smoke” to Jenrick growing up – and sat down with him in Westminster.

Farage told me he thinks Jenrick will end up to the right of him. A number of prominent Cameroons are quietly impressed by him. A driving point of the piece is that there is less of a chasm between Farage and Cameron today than you might think.

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We also broke down the piece here on the podcast. Here’s a clip from that:

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The opening of the piece follows below. You can click through to read on at the NS.

Inside Robert Jenrick’s New Right revolution

The shadow justice secretary’s gonzo stunts are dragging British politics into uncharted territory.

There is a story being told about Robert Jenrick. It runs like this: shortly after 7 October 2023, and shortly before he resigned as immigration minister from his friend Rishi Sunak’s government, he was with his three daughters, who have an American Jewish mother, when all four of them were caught up in a pro-Palestine march. They were in some sense surrounded – that, at least, is how they felt. It is said to have been a crystallising moment for Jenrick. It was when he realised that Britain was becoming a very different country to the one in which he grew up, and it was time to stand, as many a conservative has, against that tide and athwart history.

It is a story that seems to have acquired its own momentum, transforming in the telling. When I asked Jenrick to tell it to me, he struggled, whether out of reluctance or an inability to recount what didn’t quite happen. An incidental encounter has spiralled into something mythical; something that speaks to the fears many on the British right now harbour – of cultural alienation and physical displacement. Jenrick should not be considered synonymous with the burgeoning online right, but they are finding in him someone to believe in, whether or not he believes in them.

Others, from a very different wing of the Conservative tradition, are finding reason to believe in him too. He recently had lunch with David Cameron and George Osborne, the last architects of a successful Tory revival, at Oswald’s in Mayfair. They swapped war stories and mused on Labour’s fate. The pair also got a feel for him, testing his progress, and assessing how much substance there was to a man who has been an MP for 11 years and is only now beginning to emerge as a national figure. He impressed them.

Multiple people involved in the Cameron project 20 years ago see something in Jenrick. It is a mistake to look on him in bewilderment as a formerly “full-fat subscriber to David Cameron” who has since betrayed that cause by straying towards Faragism. The truth is that the party itself is moving: Cameron would not be as liberal today as he was in 2005. “A tougher world needs a tougher Tory message,” as one former cabinet minister put it to me. “Circumstances have changed.” Cameron is known to respect Jenrick’s passion and energy for the arduous, years-long fight of opposition.

Nigel Farage also recognises Jenrick’s vim. “I’ll give him credit for some good videos, for trying hard,” Farage told me, before adding: “But he can’t get away from the record of the last 14 years.” He questions Jenrick’s reinvention as the leader of the Tory right who now wants Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – “If he is this modern-day convert, why is he having lunch with Cameron and Osborne?” – but Farage, too, may be mistaken in thinking Cameron and Jenrick are at opposite ends of the Conservative spectrum. Talk to Tory moderates and you will find far harder views on immigration and much else than any of them expressed in the 2010s.

Farage thinks Jenrick will “almost certainly” end up to the right of him on migration by the next election: “I suspect he will probably go further – that’s just my instinct for someone who wants to make noise.” In fact, the Reform leader thinks he is to the left of the country on the issue. “I haven’t fought the change itself, provided it comes with integration,” he insisted, tacking to the centre in pursuit of power. Still, Farage thinks “things have really shifted” in the country at large. As he seeks to moderate his image, the country – it seems – is radicalising. So is the Conservative Party.

This shift in Tory perspective is a product of what Ed Lister, Boris Johnson’s longest-serving adviser inside No 10, described to me as the “abject failure” of the points-based immigration system introduced by Johnson’s government at the beginning of 2021. It led to the “Boriswave”, under which 4.5 million people immigrated to the UK in 2021-24. “We thought it was going to reduce numbers and bring us the high-skilled people that we needed as a country,” Lister said. Jenrick now describes Johnson’s rewriting of the immigration system as “probably the worst public policy decision of my lifetime”.

Today, even a Tory moderate like Lister sees the appeal of leaving the ECHR. He remembers being briefed in 2020 inside No 10 on how greatly Britain’s membership of it had reduced the government’s “room for manoeuvre” in dealing with illegal migration. The Tory party was not ready to hear this then, but that has changed. The party is now expected to call for Britain to leave the ECHR this autumn, as Jenrick advocated a year ago. He has called for a “Great Repeal Act” to unpick the latticework of laws, domestic and supranational, that hold back ministers.

At the centre of all these shifts lies a man unknown, if increasingly visible online after a series of viral videos. When Jenrick was elected in 2014, aged 32, having been a restless young solicitor and a director at Christie’s, he struck journalists as “nice and rather dull”. His subsequent path – housing secretary at 37, immigration minister at 40, odds-on favourite to lead the Tory party into the next election today – hasn’t been a “straight-line trajectory”, as one quiet ally, again on the Tory left, puts it. But everyone, including his critics, recognises him as an able worker who absorbs himself in tasks, even if his career so far has been marked by a series of failures: to pass planning reform, to stand up the Rwanda plan, to become Tory leader.

I accompanied Jenrick on a recent trip to Birmingham – the centre of England, and the “big smoke” for him as a boy, growing up as he did half an hour away in the small market town of Shifnal, west of Wolverhampton (population: 9,730). We spoke for an hour that day and an hour back in Westminster the following week. We talked about his parents, his influences, his experiences, his plans; about why some consider his political turn to be dangerous, about why he thinks such fears are outdated and corrosive in their own way.

He was willing to sift through the implications of his positions on immigration – he thinks migration the issue of his lifetime – although he was eager to move on to other aspects of what he sees as Britain’s current mosaic of error; to show his range, his depth. His decision to give the New Statesman his first significant interview since losing the party leadership could, in itself, be read as a statement of his ambition. He was happy to follow the lead of my questions, which treated him as a candidate for prime minister and a future party leader. His brief as shadow justice secretary rarely came up. Kemi Badenoch, the current Tory leader, did not come up at all.

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I am back up on Twitter, here. On another note, imagine driving this:

Sculpting this:

Or painting this:

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Have a good evening.