Robert Jenrick insists that he is happy where he is. I am told that he “genuinely” did not want to be shadow chancellor, and that he is “concentrating on the job at hand” as shadow justice secretary.
“That’s what Kemi [Badenoch] has asked him to do for her, and that’s what he has to focus on,” says an ally. Jenrick focuses on it effectively, finding the holy grail of “cut-through” for his recent video in which he accosted fare-dodgers and asked them if they would go back and pay.
That is just about in his justice department brief – but he is also known for ranging more widely in his social media communications. Pride of place in his X (I still call it Twitter) account is a two-minute video setting out his assessment of Keir Starmer’s first year, a “year of lies and decline”. It is the sort of thing a leader of the opposition might produce – if they were unwise enough to use the word “lies”.
Jenrick’s ambition is taken for granted across Westminster. At his summer reception for journalists at No 10 last night, the prime minister joked about Jenrick’s imminent replacement of Kemi Badenoch.
Most senior Conservatives who are no longer MPs say the same three things privately. One, that they do not expect Badenoch to survive as leader through this parliament. Two, that they expect Jenrick to succeed her. And three, that they think he will do a deal with Nigel Farage to “unite the right” before the election.
Jenrick’s allies try to squash such talk – or, at least, they try to make it clear that their man is not encouraging it. One tells me: “Rob is concentrating on the job at hand as shadow justice, trying to highlight issues that need fixing and then putting pressure on the government to fix them.”
When I point out that leadership speculation is rife, this ally says: “Others can talk about whatever they like, but Kemi’s job is incredibly tough and she’s doing a good job. It’s not for Rob to get into any leadership chatter.”
But the chatter is happening anyway. Will Lloyd has an article in the New Statesman repeating a lot of it, and predicting that Badenoch will be challenged when the rules allow it after she has been leader for a year in November.
This may be right, even if a lot of the criticism of Badenoch is unfair. I do not believe that either Jenrick or James Cleverly would have done any better over the past year: the Conservative Party’s problems go much deeper than something that can be fixed by a swashbuckling performance at Prime Minister’s Questions or a viral video.
The problem is the Tory government’s record, particularly on immigration, and no one who was a minister in that government is going to escape that record until they have served several years in quarantine.
But politics isn’t fair, and so the Tories might change leader, despite Badenoch trying to shore up her position by bringing Cleverly into the shadow cabinet. It might happen because it is one of the few things that a Tory MP can actually do that might make a difference, even if they know that it probably won’t.
This is despite the doubling of the threshold for triggering a leadership election. After Badenoch was elected, Bob Blackman, the chair of the Tory backbench 1922 Committee, announced that a vote of no confidence in the leader would require private letters from one-third of Tory MPs, namely 40 out of 120, as opposed to the 15 per cent, or 18 MPs, previously needed. As Jenrick had 41 votes in the final MPs’ ballot last year, this higher number is clearly attainable – even if it probably wouldn’t happen straight away in November.
Tory MPs would be right to hesitate long and hard before they take such a step. The party has got into the habit of changing leaders, which makes it look like a desperate and directionless rabble. And if it is not obvious that Jenrick would have done better over the past year, why would he do significantly better in future?
As for doing a deal with Farage, what is in it for Reform UK? It is not too strong to say that Reform activists hate the Tory party, and there is an equal and opposite repulsion, in that many Tory voters would rather vote Lib Dem than have anything to do with Farage.
Nor were relations between Jenrick and Reform smoothed by last week’s clash between Jenrick and Zia Yusuf, the head of Reform’s “Doge” unit. Yusuf claimed that “one of the team who post to my X account accidentally pressed ‘like’ on an awful antisemitic tweet” about Jenrick, whose wife is Jewish. Jenrick refused to accept Yusuf’s apology, calling it “bulls***”.
This spat complicates the other big option for Jenrick, which would be to defect to Reform.
This simply “isn’t a consideration”, according to Jenrick’s ally, and it does seem unlikely. It would depend on Jenrick not becoming Tory leader but deciding, nearer to the next election, that Reform was likely to overtake the Tories in the number of seats in the Commons.
Then, if Jenrick is as ambitious as many of his colleagues assume he is, he might think that his best chance of a senior ministerial job would be in a Reform-led government. As I say, unlikely. But a lot of unlikely things have happened in politics.
