Who is the real Robert Jenrick? As the contest to replace Rishi Sunak as leader of the Conservative Party has dragged on over the summer and into autumn, that question has hung over proceedings.
The 42-year-old MP for Newark has been both a frontrunner and an underdog in this campaign. He has led the pack in terms of MP endorsements for much of the race but trailed fellow finalist Kemi Badenoch in head-to-head polls with the members, who will ultimately crown the winner on Saturday 2 November.
His political positioning is tricky to define in broad-brush strokes. Elected in a by-election in 2014, Jenrick was first a Remain-backing Cameron loyalist; then Boris Johnson’s buccaneering millennial housing secretary who wrote essays in support of One Nation Conservatism; then a trusted ally of Rishi Sunak, who sent him to the Home Office as immigration minister. He lasted just over a year – enough time to order the painting over of a mural of cartoon characters at migrant detention centre in Kent on the grounds that it was too welcoming. When he resigned in December 2023, Jenrick cited “strong disagreements” with the government over its Rwanda bill, which he deemed insufficiently tough to tackle the challenge of illegal immigration.
Since then, this former centrist has pitched himself as an anti-immigration champion. He has been adopted by the more right-wing, Brexity branch of the fractured Tory party, winning endorsements from the likes of Mark Francois, Edward Leigh and Suella Braverman, along with her mentor Sir John Hayes. In a survey held by the Popular Conservatives group – the movement founded by Liz Truss and her allies – Jenrick emerged as favourite to lead the party.
Andrew Marr has called Jenrick “a very ambitious blur”; critics in Westminster describe him as a “shapeshifter”, a populist prepared to say whatever is needed to win now (he can always backtrack later). His nickname before he emerged as a possible successor to Sunak was “Robert Generic”. A kinder interpretation from supportive MPs is that he was “radicalised” by his time in the Home Office, seeing up close exactly how dysfunctional the UK’s immigration system had become, and that his Damascene conversion is genuine. Either way, the absence of a centrist candidate in the final two (after James Cleverly was unexpectedly knocked out) has made this a race between two right-wingers, each promising they can unite the shattered party and lead it back to victory by returning to true Conservative values.
Jenrick’s background is an encapsulation of the thorny and often contradictory dynamics of British class and geography. His father was a gas-fitter from Manchester who later set up his own business selling fireplaces, his mother a secretary from Liverpool. Both left school at 16. Jenrick was raised just outside Telford, Shropshire. “Some people would say, slightly snobbishly, [that this was] a boring, provincial place to grow up” he acknowledges. He has talked about money being tight, with his parents anxiously discussing the family finances at the dinner table.
But when his grandfather died, his grandmother used some of the life insurance payment she received to send Jenrick and his sister to private school – setting him on a very different trajectory. He went to Cambridge to study history and then trained as a corporate lawyer, before going to work at the luxury auction house Christie’s. There he met his wife, an Israeli-born partner at a UK law firm who grew up in the US. The couple have three daughters and multiple homes, including a £2.6m Westminster townhouse, and the Grade 1 listed Eye Manor in Herefordshire.
This property portfolio raised eyebrows when Jenrick was appointed housing and communities secretary by Johnson in 2019, with murmurs he was too out of touch to understand the scale of the housing crisis. But those who worked with him at the time say Jenrick quickly grasped the impact the planning system was having, pricing young people out of ever being able to afford a home. “He wanted to shake up the planning system – he saw it as the biggest block on economic growth,” one told me. “He had the zeal of radical reformer. It was both right and brave, but it put him at odds with Tory backbenchers.”
When Jenrick was shuffled out of Johnson’s cabinet in September 2021 critics pointed to various scandals. These included a kerfuffle about which of his homes was his primary residence during the first Covid lockdown, and his intervention in a planning decision in January 2020 granting the developer (who happened to be a Conservative donor Jenrick had recently sat next to at a dinner) permission for a £1bn project the day before a rule change meant he would have faced a £30-50m infrastructure levy. (The controversy dragged on for months and the decision was eventually reversed in 2021, then green-lit again in August 2024.) But Jenrick’s allies argue Johnson sacked him because of pressure from Nimby Tory MPs over his radical planning overhaul. Michael Gove, who replaced him, quickly shelved the reforms. Jenrick has called that decision “probably the biggest public policy mistake of the last parliament”. The Conservatives’ failure on homebuilding over the past 14 years was a key factor in Jenrick’s analysis of why the party suffered such a catastrophic defeat.
His other diagnosis is immigration. Allies of Jenrick say that he went into the department with an open mind and found it – in his words – “in ashes”. Small boat crossings were rising; there was a crisis brewing at the overflowing Manston migrant centre in Kent, with reports of a diphtheria outbreak; the out-of-control asylum backlog meant hotels were being requisitioned last-minute to house migrants waiting to be processed; and all the while legal migration was reaching record highs.
“The department he entered was utterly broken,” one ally recalled. “The brutal reality he was confronted with would have alarmed anyone.” Another described him as being “radicalised by the facts, the same way he was radicalised with housing”.
The government’s main strategy for “stopping the boats”, one of the Sunak’s five pledges at the start of 2023, was the controversial Rwanda bill. While opponents argued it was a breach of human rights and contrary to UK law, Jenrick’s assessment as the minister responsible for bringing the bill forward was it did not go far enough. When his concerns were not heeded, he resigned, rallying 60 Tory rebels to his cause. At the time, some Conservatives viewed this as an act of integrity; others, of opportunism. This was also when Jenrick started his campaign for Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. “The Rwanda Bill is a sham. We have no choice but to leave the ECHR” he wrote in April, a month before Sunak called the election. Leaving the ECHR and restoring the scrapped Rwanda scheme is now centrepiece of his leadership pitch, along with implementing a cap on legal migration.
Jenrick himself claims he is not overly right-wing but committed instead to the “common ground” of British politics “shared by millions”, aiming to win back voters who abandoned to the Tories in all directions with a focus on immigration, the economy and the NHS (the three top voter priorities in the last election). He has been particularly scathing about the failures of the Liz Truss experiment (calling the mini-budget “cack-handed, careless, and un-Conservative”), and has suggested there would be space his in his team for high-profile figures from all wings of the party, from Jacob Rees-Mogg to Penny Mordaunt and Andy Street.
At the same time, there is no question his primary strategy has been to tack right and appeal to Tories worried about the spectre of Nigel Farage and Reform. In the one head-to-head media grilling of the two finalists hosted on GB News, Jenrick’s opening salvo was: “Immigration is not just one issue amongst many. It is the issue.” The economy and the NHS got far less airtime.
It wasn’t enough to win over the studio audience, who overwhelmingly backed Badenoch. Still, the Jenrick team remains hopeful. Allies say the London-centric GB News audience was not representative of Conservative members, who are notoriously difficult to poll. Surveys like those regularly put out by ConservativeHome, which show Badenoch leading comfortably, are thought-provoking but inconclusive, they argue. A YouGov poll conducted before the party conference (during which Badenoch attracted criticism for her comments on maternity pay and the minimum wage being too high) had the pair at a much closer radio of 48 to 52.
“Rob is outworking Kemi,” one ally noted, pointing out he has done around 200 hustings across the country and over 100 in person. The team had also been pushing for more debates, which Badenoch and CCHQ resisted.
Will it be enough to win him the dubious prize of leading the Conservative party at its lowest ebb? We’ll find out on Saturday who members think presents a bigger threat to Labour. Fans of “Box office” Badenoch believe she has the passion and ferocity to grab attention even in opposition and cause trouble for the government. Jenrick’s supporters accuse her of starting unnecessary and distracting spats (such as with Doctor Who actor David Tennant), arguing his temperament and professionalism makes him less off-putting to swing voters, even if policies such as leaving the ECHR are to the right of where the Tory party was until very recently.
“We need courage and radicalism, but with the spirit of emollience and courtesy,” wrote Tory MP Danny Kruger, who is running Jenrick’s campaign. “You don’t win by hectoring people. You win by putting across a clear and persuasive message with courtesy.”
Jenrick’s message is that he has come to his positions through direct experience of the structures he is criticising – from the immigration framework to the planning system. Rather than a “shapeshifter”, one supporter told me, he’s someone with clear ideological principles but who has also shown a willingness to rethink when confronted with reality. The current reality is that the Conservatives are in deep trouble. “Our brand is tainted,” Jenrick warned the month after the election. Do Tory party members have faith that he can restore it?
[See also: The UK has moved closer to European social democracy]
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