Any assessment of the long-term impact of Robert Jenrick’s defection on the Conservative party must start with what you think he represents – not merely the what of his views, and his popularity with the party grassroots, but the why of them.
Is he merely a talented opportunist, a snake in the Tory Eden who was leading it astray? Or was he trying to answer the challenge of the moment, which many of his former colleagues simply preferred to ignore?
This is politics we’re talking about, so there is no doubt that personal ambition played its part in last week’s events. But the real danger to the Tory party of Jenrick’s defection is that it encourages its complacency, with the wing of the party that never liked Jenrick seeing his departure as an opportunity to retreat to its comfort zone.
Kemi Badenoch handled the defection about as well as she could have, and deserves the plaudits. Her position as leader of the party is much more secure than it was a week ago, and not just because her most obvious rival has left it.
The Tory ship is still on stormy waters, and one reef is clearly visible. MPs on the left of the party have made no bones about their hopes that this departure will lead to a change of course, and this has been echoed and amplified by editorials in sympathetic newspapers such as the Times.
For this Tory tendency, Jenrick’s departure is the vindication of good tactics, but poor strategy. Like him or not, he was the focus of the 2024 leadership contest; the final decision boiled down to “Robert Jenrick” or “Not Robert Jenrick”, and Badenoch adroitly positioned herself to scoop up the larger pool of “Not Robert Jenrick” votes.
The problem is that Jenrick’s critics didn’t, and don’t, have an alternative diagnosis of what ails the party or the country – they just know that they don’t like his prescriptions. The choice in November 2024 thus resembled nothing so much as the choice between getting out of bed and hitting the snooze button. And as anyone who hates mornings will tell you, the snooze button doesn’t make the alarm clock, or the world, go away.
Hence the endless attempts to insist that the Conservatives lost the 2024 general election not because of any intellectual, ideological, or even policy shortcoming, but on “competence”, a pseudo-profundity that implodes at the slightest serious inquiry. Was it incompetent to oversee an increase in immigration, or to promise not to? To endlessly raise taxes, or to say they’d cut them? To shut more than 20 prisons, or to talk tough on law and order?
Dig into those issues, or any other possible manifestation of lack of “competence”, and you get to the two things to which today’s Conservative party is deeply allergic: discussion of serious divisions in philosophy and policy, and the risk of embarrassing former ministers who now sit in the shadow cabinet.
Whatever the balance of his motivations, there was enough truth in that part of Jenrick’s broadside against his former party for the blows to land. Badenoch stood for the leadership promising a thorough interrogation of the party’s failures in office, and then pivoted smoothly to insisting it had already taken place.
Jenrick’s opponents clearly hope that his departure is an opportunity for a return to something. But to what? A Conservative party that runs on promises to cut taxes and immigration while taking both to historic highs? That it managed to get four terms of office out of saying things but not meaning them was remarkable; there is no future in chasing a fifth.
It is a sad fact of democracy that politics must be conducted with reference to the electorate. There has always been a tendency in the Tory party which insisted that if only Nigel Farage were ignored, he and his various parties would simply go away.
This was understandable, if not wise, when he was merely topping the polls in European elections. But Reform UK has been leading the national polls for months. A “mainstream party of the right” needs the right, as well as the mainstream; the alternative is shrivelling into a rump party for people who take themselves too seriously to be Liberal Democrats.
However much she might dislike Jenrick personally, Badenoch cannot do without the Conservative members and voters he – until the end the most popular member of the shadow cabinet in ConservativeHome’s league table – represented.
Nor can she afford to retreat into the politics of word over deed that Jenrick’s bitterest critics seem too often to favour. Their triumphalism over the weekend has been a gift to Farage, reinforcing Jenrick’s charges even as Badenoch tried to rebut them. Her future now depends on proving not merely her critics, but her most voluble and least helpful supporters, wrong.
Henry Hill is deputy editor of ConservativeHome
