Galloping through some crowd-pleasing lines as she delivered a typically rambunctious speech at last year’s Tory Party conference, the then Home Secretary Suella Braverman berated Albanian migrants, environmental anarchists and Islamist fundamentalists.
Then she paused, and became momentarily reflective. ‘Labour is the party of pressure groups, rich zealots and trade union activists. But, you know, the Conservative Party is also a kind of trade union. Because we are the trade union of the British people,’ she said.
A couple of weeks ago, Robert Jenrick appeared on the BBC to deliver his pitch for the Tory leadership. Who presented the biggest threat to the Tories, he was asked. Nigel Farage or Sir Ed Davey?
‘I don’t believe that you have to pick a lane,’ Jenrick replied. ‘I want to bring back the millions of people we lost to Reform, by leaving the ECHR [European Court of Human Rights], by ending the era of mass migration, and I want to bring back the people we’ve lost to the Lib Dems. I want the Conservative Party to be the trade union for the working people of this country.’
Today, the final ballot papers are landing on the doormats of Conservative Party members. They face two choices: Kemi Badenoch, the fiery, formidable – if somewhat erratic – former President of the Board of Trade. And…well, to be honest, nobody is entirely sure. The second name printed on the ballot is someone called Robert Jenrick. Who I presume is the same person who appeared on the BBC mouthing the words of Suella Braverman. Although apparently, they’re not the former Home Secretary’s words either.
‘That line was given to her by John Hayes,’ a shadow minister told me ‘and he’s now working closely with Jenrick.’
I know a little bit about Hayes. He was born near me in South East London and grew up on a local council estate. He’s been MP for South Holland and the Deepings in Lincolnshire since 1997, and Braverman’s mentor. Or, as another shadow minister told me ‘Suella’s political groomer’.
And he’s now running his robustly Right-wing messages through Robert Jenrick.
But which Jenrick? Most people in Westminster have regarded the Tory leadership contender as a solid but unremarkable middle-ranking minister with an interest in housing. Then, last year, he popped up in the Home Office. According to someone who claims to know him a little bit, Jenrick wasn’t especially enamoured with this appointment.
‘When told he was being made Immigration Minister, he cried,’ they told me.
But if he did, it was a different Jenrick who turned up at his new Department in Marsham Street. This Robert Jenrick was energised and enthused. To such an extent that when interviewed on Good Morning Britain in May, he claimed to have overseen ‘the biggest net reduction in immigration of all time’. He boasted: ‘I persuaded the Prime Minister to put in place measures that will reduce the number of people coming into this country by 300,000.’
Although that claim was disputed a few weeks later. By someone else going by the name of Robert Jenrick. ‘We did not deliver,’ he chided when asked by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg why the Tories had lost the election ‘above all, on the secure borders and controlled and reduced migration.’
In my attempt to track down the real Robert Jenrick – or at least someone answering to his description – I spoke to a former senior advisor in Rishi Sunak’s Downing Street. Did they recall the Robert Jenrick who had successfully persuaded Sunak to slash immigration by record numbers?
Or was the Robert Jenrick they knew the man who resigned from government, angrily stating: ‘I refuse to be another politician who makes promises to the British people on immigration, but does not keep them’?
It actually turned out to be somebody different altogether. ‘Rishi and Rob were close,’ they told me. ‘They were two of the Three Musketeers, along with Oliver Dowden. They were the young, dynamic future of the party. But Rob was the most liberal of the three. That’s why he was put in the Home Office, to balance Suella.’
The Liberal Jenrick is definitely a real person, because there have been other confirmed sightings.
During the Brexit referendum, he campaigned for Remain, and signed a letter saying voting Leave would ‘lead us into a dystopia’. So how, and when, did this Robert Jenrick get replaced by the doppelganger who darkly warned the Prime Minister a couple of weeks ago not to ‘lose the Brexit benefits’?
Some Tory insiders claim it followed his decision to bring in a posse of hard-charging and ruthlessly effective former Suella Braverman advisers to mastermind his campaign.
One journalist who interviewed Jenrick noticed that after every answer, he hurriedly looked to his aides for approval.
‘He doesn’t do anything they haven’t gamed out in advance,’ one MP told me.
Others point to the influence of his successful corporate lawyer wife Michal Berkner.
‘She’s his real campaign director,’ a shadow minister told me. ‘He follows her advice on everything. Someone with them at dinner the other day said she was ordering for him. He worships her.’
The perception among some Conservative MPs is that Jenrick is mimicking the strategy of Sir Keir Starmer. He will run to the Right in order to secure the Tory crown, then pivot back and rediscover his liberal instincts. ‘I told Robert to his face: “You’ve surrounded yourself with some bad people”,’ one MP said. ‘His response was “they’re not important. If I win, they won’t control me”.’
So who will? All politicians go on a journey. But it’s very hard to see precisely where Robert
Jenrick’s started, and where it is meant to end.
Last Thursday, I watched the GB News hustings. Someone claiming to be him was slated to appear.
But he didn’t turn up. A man called Robert Jenrick served as Immigration Minister for 14 months. But this Robert Jenrick seemed to have opposed most of the previous Government’s immigration policies.
A Robert Jenrick spent more than two years as Housing Minister. But this Jenrick believed the Government had failed to build enough houses. The records show a Robert Jenrick was appointed Exchequer Secretary by Theresa May in 2018. But this impersonator repeatedly castigated the Government for failing to pursue a sufficiently robust economic agenda
In a fortnight’s time, the Conservative Party will elect a new leader. I’m still no clearer to knowing who the real Robert Jenrick is. And more importantly, I’m not sure Robert Jenrick knows exactly who Robert Jenrick is either.
