Tory leadership debate: Jenrick fails to catch Badenoch

There was a clear winner, and several missed opportunities.

Photo by Dan Kitwood/Ian Forsyth/Getty Images

This was it. The one and only event for the two finalists in the Conservative leadership contest, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch, played out on GB News in front of a live audience in Westminster. “Some of you at home will have your pens hovering over the ballot paper,” teased host Chris Hope at the start: with ballots sent to members this week, this was the last real chance either candidate had to change minds before voting begins. So what did we learn?

This wasn’t a head-to-head between the candidates: instead, they took turns to make opening statements before taking questions from Hope and the audience, then a quickfire round from viewers at home. First up was Jenrick. The polls and bookies suggest he is trailing Badenoch, which explains both his push for more debates and his anxiety last night. The former immigration minister was visibly edgy, gabbling over pre-prepared lines and gesticulating wildly during his pitch.

That pitch, to paraphrase Tony Blair, was immigration, immigration, immigration. It is no secret that Jenrick, once considered a One Nation centrist, has positioned himself as the candidate to win back voters from Nigel Farage. He started off with outrage that hotels are being used to house migrants, and continued from there. “Immigration is not just one issue amongst many,” he began. “It is the issue.” The reason the Conservatives lost the election so badly, Jenrick argued, came down entirely to a failure to control Britain’s borders. Reversing the party’s fortunes would be similarly simple: on illegal immigration, leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR); on legal immigration, set a binding cap.

“It’s Leave or Remain – and I’m for Leave… It’s cap or no cap – and I’m for cap,” he declared (apparently no one has told him about such rhetorical techniques as the tricolon). The message was clear, but the delivery wooden and lacking charisma. (“He has charisntma,” a Tory friend remarked to me after.) Fittingly, Hope later reminded Jenrick of his lack of relevance with the public: “18 per cent don’t like you and most don’t know who you are.”

Jenrick was better with the audience questions. It was the usual fare: lower taxes, build more houses (but not in the manner of Labour), reduce regulations on business and childcare. His responses were solid but boring. There was the sense that ChatGPT could have been involved.

He was more confident when asked by a Jewish woman about the anti-Israel “hate marches” through London, slowing down and actually seeming to engage directly when he told her “nobody should feel unsafe on the streets of our capital”. When asked by Hope about a photo of him in a hoodie reading “Hamas are terrorists”, Jenrick defended it with self-assured pride. It was a glimmer at something more genuine among the soundbites.

It didn’t last. When the next question turned to the prisons crisis and the failure of the last Tory government to build enough prisons, Jenrick reverted automaton-style to his refrain of leaving the ECHR in order to deport more foreign offenders.

Then came the quickfire round of emailed questions. Asked about his opponent’s biggest weakness, Jenrick refused to take the bait, complying with the “yellow card” system put in place by Conservative Party headquarters. He pushed back on the assertion of Tory MP Christopher Chope that Badenoch was less fit to be leader because she has young children (the two candidates each have three children, of similar ages), saying “he was wrong, he was definitely wrong”. The most interesting answer was his response to musings about working with Nigel Farage. “I think Nigel Farage is rattled. He’s talking about me a lot now,” Jenrick grinned. The Reform leader might refute that – the point is that Jenrick sees his biggest chance in selling himself as the candidate most appealing to Farage fans. And he was not afraid to lean into that last night.

Badenoch’s pitch is different. While Jenrick came with an immigration agenda, she came with a message: “We are in opposition, so let’s use this time wisely.” This leadership contest, she argued in a thinly veiled Jenrick critique, “is not a test of who can make the biggest promises… the policies will come.” But first, according to Badenoch, the Conservatives need a deeper look at what it is they stand for as a party, and what went wrong during 14 years of government. “This broken system is going to need an engineer to fix it. I am an engineer,” she said with smile, to a round of enthusiastic applause.

Whether through innate confidence or the privilege of going second, Badenoch displayed none of Jenrick’s nerves. But there was a flash of visible anger when Hope raised reports she is impossible to work with (accusations she quickly batted aside), and while she laughed at his suggestion that she could start a fight with her own reflection, her tone turned fiery whenever pressed on her record.

Still, if Team Jenrick was hoping she’d snap and lose her cool, it didn’t work. The opposite, if anything. Challenged on her decision not to repeal all EU legislation in 2023 when in government, which angered Brexiteers at the time, Badenoch retorted “I wasn’t going to scrap product safety laws, was I?” Asked whether Brexit has been a success, she answered “some of it has been a success but some of it has not” with a frankness only available to a Conservative whose Brexit credentials have never been in doubt (although some Tories might disagree with her assertion that “no one else has done more on Brexit than I did”).

Will Tory members be convinced by her pitch? If all they want is to leave the ECHR, Badenoch made it clear she isn’t their woman, deriding the idea that there is an immigration silver bullet. Nor did she rise to a question about chasing Reform voters. On the topic of letting Farage into the party, her attitude was one of defiance: “We are a broad church, but if somebody says they want to burn your church down, you don’t let them in.”

There is a danger Badenoch went too abstract, talking of principles and renewal while Jenrick came armed with a clear policy agenda. Still, the audience had made up their mind. A show of hands immediately after demonstrated an overwhelming majority for Badenoch. Away from the live action, the GB News presenter Patrick Christys was hosting a reaction show in the studio – “the Aftersun of the political Love Island”, as he put it. The viewers there came to the same conclusion. If Jenrick hoped last night would be the thing to move the dial, his team will be disappointed.