On the coffee table in Robert Jenrick’s Commons office sits an evocative item of US political memorabilia. It’s a badge from Robert F. Kennedy’s ill-fated presidential campaign in 1968, and it reads: WE WANT BOBBY K.
It’s an in-joke for the Conservative’s own leadership campaign today. They are about to come out with their own line of merchandise, saying: WE WANT BOBBY J.
But who wants Bobby Jenrick? And if they get the mild-mannered 42-year-old solicitor from the English Midlands, what kind of leader would he be?
The answer to the first question seems to be: plenty of Tories fed up with untrammelled rates of immigration, both legal and illegal. Turning back that tide is the centrepiece of Jenrick’s policy pitch, after a startling transformation from bland backbench loyalist to Right-wing culture warrior.
“Successive governments promised controlled and reduced immigration only to deliver completely the opposite. And I've been very honest that poor decisions were made by the ministers at the time, immediately after the 2019 general election,” the former communities secretary says.
If that sounds very much like a pitch from Nigel Farage, it’s because Jenrick is on a mission to make Reform UK “redundant”.
Far-right rioters may have run rampant across town centres this summer but their grievances need to be debated, not ignored, he insists.
The Tory contender talks now about restoring a lost sense of “English identity”, even if he struggles to articulate what that means. What about other identities in this multi-racial, vibrant mix of islands?
Jenrick says he has no problem with them, but complains of areas including in London “where spoken English is not as strong as it should be, where identities are divided, and even at times, on occasion, there are inter-communal tensions”.
With Rishi Sunak on his way out, the four-strong Tory field has pitched up at the Conservative conference in Birmingham to sell their vision to the party rank and file.
After the conference, the much-reduced band of 121 Tory MPs will vote to eliminate two more of the candidates, after ranking Jenrick top in their ballots so far. The members will then get to decide between the final pair. The result is due on November 2, three days before the latest US presidential election.
Bobby Kennedy too went on a political journey. He started out as the ruthless and unprincipled enforcer for John F. Kennedy, until his elder brother was assassinated. Then he became a fearless and eloquent campaigner against racial and social injustice, until he too was gunned down.
But Bobby K wore his heart on his sleeve. What makes Bobby J tick? The answer to that is a lot more elusive, as we found over a rather strained 45 minutes.
We’re here with three of Jenrick’s youthful Spads in his gloomy office, tucked away in the further reaches of Parliament now that the Conservatives are in opposition.
I think that Sadiq Khan has failed London. London is a city in decline under Sadiq Khan…. The London dream is fading
A can of Diet Coke has been left by the sofa and is overturned as we take our places, creating an unsightly gush of brown liquid on the tired green carpet. One of the aides hurriedly covers it in clumps of loo roll. Jenrick smiles tightly, his beady brown eyes on alert.
We try a few gentle warm-up questions, about home life, about London life, about favourite restaurants and bars. We meet a brick wall.
The MP for Newark in Nottinghamshire studied history at Cambridge, specialising in the bloodthirsty Tudor and Stuart periods. However, he demurs when asked if there are any lessons to be drawn for politics today. Got a good history book on the go? No, he’s been rather busy.
It’s made clear by his aides that the former Cabinet minister is outside his comfort zone and is here only to talk politics. That seems odd, given we’re only a few days away from the conference. Now’s the time to open up a bit, surely?
OK, let’s stick to the politics: what makes you different from the other pretenders to Rishi Sunak’s crown - Kemi Badenoch, Tom Tugendhat and James Cleverly? “Change,” he says, boasting the record of a “reformer”.
Sir Keir Starmer said the same on his path to 10 Downing Street. It’s blandly inoffensive, but Jenrick maintains that he doesn’t believe “in platitudes or continuity”.
“I think the Conservative Party has to change. We’ve just suffered our worst ever electoral defeat and we have to be painfully honest about the mistakes that we’ve made, that we didn’t deliver enough when we were in government on the NHS, on the economy, on immigration,” he says.
“And I want the Party to go in a different direction where we come forward with serious answers that the country needs to the big challenges facing us right now. And that’s what I believe I offer.”
Accused by some of his backbench colleagues of political opportunism, Jenrick insists that his hardline conversion as a Home Office minister was borne of seeing up close the impact on community cohesion, crime and the jobs market of mass and illegal immigration since Brexit.
“My values haven’t changed,” he says, perhaps unconsciously aping the exact words of Kamala Harris when the Democratic White House hopeful recently explained her own policy U-turns.
The Tory, who is unabashedly backing Donald Trump against Harris, says: “I have changed my views - my views have evolved as I’ve been exposed to facts.
“For example, as Immigration Minister where I saw the harm that mass migration was causing to our country, the way it was exacerbating the housing crisis, making it more difficult to access public services and making us a less united country.”
Jenrick wants a hard quota set by MPs to get a grip on legal migration, along with the revival of Sunak’s expensive and never-implemented Rwanda plan as a deterrent to illegal migration on small boats across the Channel.
Jenrick wasn’t always like this. He was a Remain-backing loyalist to David Cameron who, after a stint in charge of communities and housing in Boris Johnson’s Cabinet, was installed by Sunak as a junior Home Office minister to keep a wary eye on the maverick Suella Braverman.
The move backfired on the then PM. Jenrick emerged seemingly radicalised himself - going as far as calling for the UK to quit the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), much to the delight of the hard Tory Right.
Like Braverman before she was forced out as Home Secretary, he contends that multiculturalism has not been an “unalloyed success” and that police need to do more to impose law and order “without fear or favour”.
‘We have to be painfully honest about the mistakes that we’ve made, that we didn’t deliver enough when we were in government on the NHS, on the economy, on immigration’
Jenrick would rather not talk about his favourite hangouts in the world’s greatest capital, but is scathing about Sadiq Khan’s record on house building, crime and London’s disappearing night-life.
“I think that Sadiq Khan has failed London. London is a city in decline under Sadiq Khan…. The London dream is fading,” the Conservative claims, accusing the “incompetent” Labour Mayor of having to forfeit billions in central government funding for housing when Jenrick held the communities brief.
“It’s increasingly unaffordable, unsafe, harder to get around,” he says, highlighting the epidemic of knife crime.
“It's unaffordable because the housing crisis has spiralled under Sadiq Khan, and that's having immensely harmful impacts upon people, from young people who are stuck in flat shares, to families and vulnerable people unable to get good-quality permanent housing.”
In fact over 14 years, the Conservatives never came close to their home-building targets and were accused of actively styming planning reforms to the benefit of developers and local “Nimby” opponents.
There was no shortage of financial scandals. Jenrick came back from a potentially career-ending imbroglio involving a luxury housing development by former porn baron turned Daily Express owner Richard Desmond.
The Mayor and London councils also stand accused by Jenrick of imposing onerous conditions on pubs and restaurants, including by blocking one measure he pushed as communities secretary to allow more al-fresco dining.
Khan’s “nightlife tsar” Amy Lamé has been a “complete failure”, he says, while insisting that the hapless Tory mayoral hopeful Susan Hall was a “good candidate” despite fairly crushing evidence to the contrary.
The Conservative has three daughters aged 13, 11 and 9 with his Israeli-born wife, Michal Berkner, who like him is a lawyer. Like Lady Victoria Starmer, Ms Berkner is of Jewish heritage. The children in both families are being raised by their parents to be conscious of their mixed cultural and religious inheritance.
Discussion of the family is off-limits but Jenrick is happy to recall the “Conservative values” he and his elder sister inherited from their father - a gas fitter turned small businessman - and mother, who was a secretary.
While Sir Keir has reluctantly opened up about the difficult relationship he had with his father (who was a toolmaker, lest we forget), Jenrick talks fondly about his parents, who are both still alive. He remains close to his sister, a London estate agent.
“They're following this (leadership race) with interest,” he says of his parents, although they can be his “harshest critics” - especially his mother.
“My mum is an avid watcher of the Parliament channel - and then texts me her advice on everything from what I say to whether my tie is done up properly, or whether my shirt is tucked in,” says the MP, who has lost four stones in the past 12 months. He says he took the weight-loss drug Ozempic for six weeks.
The Tory was a contemporary of Health Secretary Wes Streeting at Cambridge, where he worked on the student newspaper Varsity, but declines to say when they last spoke. He laughs off any suggestion that he might have pursued journalism instead of becoming a corporate solicitor after graduating. “I was sort of an essay crisis news editor,” he says.
One of his “oldest friends” from Cambridge is Katie White, the newly elected Labour MP for Leeds North West, and the Tory says he is happy to reach across the political aisle.
But if he wins in November, he vows that Prime Minister’s Questions every Wednesday opposite Sir Keir will remain an adversarial bear-pit. The weekly joust is not “old-fashioned” and “it's incredibly important that you test your political leaders and that ideas are debated robustly”.
There was no more robust debater than Robert Kennedy. His was a battle of ideas fit for the ages. (The tragedy of his life has given way to farce in the career of his namesake son, who ended a bizarre tilt at the White House in August.)
The incongruous reminder of the Democratic firebrand in Jenrick’s office brings to mind one of the great put-downs of US political history.
In 1988, Republican Dan Quayle was 41 - a year younger than Jenrick now - and had served only 12 years in Congress when he was chosen as President George H.W. Bush’s running mate.
In a TV debate with Democratic VP candidate Lloyd Bentsen, Quayle defended his inexperience by noting that John F. Kennedy had been in Congress for only 14 years when he ran in 1960.
Bentsen retorted that he had served with President Kennedy, that they were friends, and stressed: “Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."
We’ll have to see whether there is a TV debate organised between the last two Tory candidates standing. But it’ll take more than a badge to seal Robert Jenrick’s transformation, and that of his enfeebled party.
