Robert Jenrick: ‘I’ve been branded very Right wing, but my views are shared by millions’
Over coffee at home, the ex-immigration minister gives his plan for the Tories and insists he has nothing bad to say about Suella Braverman
'There is a divide between metropolitan values and the rest of the country': Robert Jenrick CREDIT: David Rose
Robert Jenrick is straight off the train and a little out of breath as he walks into the bar of Oscar’s Inn, one of his favourite pubs in his Newark, Nottinghamshire, constituency. He is an hour late for the dinner we have arranged, having taken longer than expected to catch the Speaker’s eye in the House of Commons as he waited to debate the King’s Speech.
No matter. After a quick chat with some of the regulars who helped him keep his seat, his haddock and chips arrives on a wooden platter and we discuss the order of the day: the future of the Conservative Party, and whether he will be its next leader.
Amid all the noise around Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman and Priti Patel as the Conservative leadership election looms, Jenrick has slipped almost unnoticed into the reckoning as the bookies’ second favourite.
The former immigration minister, who resigned because the Rwanda plan was not radical enough, is increasingly being seen within the party as a serious contender to replace Rishi Sunak.
He may not have the public profile of the three strong women he is likely to be up against for the support of the Right, but it is by no means impossible that Conservative MPs could put him in the final two candidates that party members will pick from.
Jenrick, 42, has not yet announced whether he will run, but the fact that he has invited The Telegraph to spend time with him in his constituency tells you all you need to know about his intentions.
If and when he does run, you can expect the phrase “unashamedly provincial” to be repeated whenever he speaks. It neatly describes where he has come from, where he stands now, and what he thinks the Conservative Party needs to stand for.
The following morning he invites me to his home, a modernised Victorian property in a converted stable block in the cathedral town of Southwell.
He shows me a black metal box, given to him by a friend. One of the original ballot boxes used when Newark was a rotten borough, it features the Duke of Newcastle’s coat of arms painted in gold on the side, in case voters were unsure which side their bread was buttered. It is, he says, a reminder of the importance of democracy – and how brutal it can be when ruling parties lose touch with the electorate.
“The Conservative Party has forgotten who votes for it,” he says over coffee in his kitchen.
“There is a big divide in our country between metropolitan values and the rest of the country, and Westminster is very heavily focused on metropolitan values at the expense of the views of millions of people elsewhere.”
Jenrick is aware that Tory Party members will need to know more about him, and what he stands for, if he is to stand any realistic chance of success. Even those who follow politics closely may struggle to place him with any precision on the sliding scale between Right and centre of the party, and they probably know even less about his background.
Eager to put this to rights, Jenrick takes me on a mini tour of his constituency, which he has represented since winning a by-election in 2014. In the market square he shows me the upstairs window of a former pub from which one of his predecessors, William Gladstone, would address his constituents in Victorian times.
We walk past hoardings that mask a building site where a closed-down Marks & Spencer has been demolished to make way for flats that Jenrick helped champion.
He insists this is the place he regards as his home, and that he breathes “a sigh of relief” every time he gets off the train at Newark Northgate station.
Jenrick also has spectacular homes elsewhere: a multimillion-pound townhouse in London, and Eye Manor, a Grade I-listed home in Herefordshire, which the family have been able to buy thanks to the main breadwinner, his wife, Michal, a partner in a London law firm. Opponents have in the past tried to portray him as out of touch because of his wealth, but he does not come from money.
'A classic small-C conservative household': Jenrick as a child with his sister, Jane, and father, Bill CREDIT: Jeff Gilbert
His Mancunian father, Bill, a gas fitter, and his Liverpudlian mother, Jenny, a secretary, were solidly working class, moving to Wolverhampton in the 1970s, where Bill started up his own business fitting fireplaces, with Jenny doing the accounts at the kitchen table.
“It was a classic small-C conservative household,” Jenrick says. “Neither of my parents were political, but they believed in family, hard work and self-reliance.”
His father, he says, did not vote Conservative until 2010, but “he did have a very strong belief that Margaret Thatcher had saved the country from socialism”. In the factories where he worked in the 1960s and 1970s, Bill had seen how businesses were destroyed by “rampant” unions.
'My parents believed in family, hard work and self-reliance': as a child with Jane and their mother, Jenny CREDIT: Jeff Gilbert
Thatcher’s Britain enabled “people like him, working-class people who wanted to get ahead in life and were willing to put in the hours, the opportunity to set up a business to do well for their family, and to prosper”, Jenrick says. At the age of 84, Bill still goes to his office in Telford every day and works full time running his fireplace business.
“He is a doer,” Jenrick says. “He’s someone who wants to achieve things, to make things. And that is what he instilled in everyone in my family.”
As children, Jenrick and his sister, Jane, would earn pocket money on Saturdays by polishing the brass on the fireplaces in the shop his father had by then set up. Home was a 1970s detached house in Shifnal, near Telford, Shropshire.
“I guess some people would say, slightly snobbishly, this was a boring, provincial place to grow up, but it’s the kind of place that millions of people across our country live in,” he says.
'My upbringing taught me about entrepreneurship and aspiration': on holiday as a child with Jane CREDIT: Jeff Gilbert
He attended a state primary school and then the private Wolverhampton Grammar School, paid for by his grandmother using a life insurance payment after the death of his grandfather.
The first generation of his family to go to university, Jenrick won a place at Cambridge to study history, then trained to be a lawyer in Birmingham, living with his parents to save money.
This is a man who grew up in a small town, who represents a small town and has never regarded London as his home. He still retains the flat vowels of a Midlander as he explains what drives him.
“My upbringing taught me a huge amount about small business, entrepreneurship, aspiration, and it gave me all the conservative values and principles that I have today,” he says. “I want to share and hand that on to other people.”
When Tony Blair won his landslide in 1997, Jenrick, then aged 15, responded by joining the Conservative Party. “It wasn’t a route to popularity,” he laughs, at a time when his contemporaries thought Labour was the answer to all ills.
“I remember going to see William Hague [who took over from John Major as Tory leader after the 1997 defeat] when he went to visit some of the seats that we’d lost,” Jenrick recalls. “He came to Shrewsbury, which was near us, and to Wolverhampton to listen to people who previously voted Conservative and then decided to walk away from the party in their droves, and I think I felt very strongly at the time that the country needed a party which believed in small business, entrepreneurship, the family, lower taxes and was a patriotic party of provincial Britain.
“And I was worried that we were going to get completely the opposite of that, under a new Labour government. Arguably that was right, and we’re in a not dissimilar situation today.”
Jenrick joined the Conservative Party at 15, after seeing Tony Blair's Labour's landslide victory in 1997 CREDIT: Jeff Gilbert
Newark is just up the road from Grantham, Lincolnshire, where another child of the provinces, Margaret Thatcher, grew up. During the English Civil War, the area was the last redoubt of the royalists (Charles I spent his last night of freedom in the Saracens Head pub in Southwell) and it remains a place of fierce patriotism to this day.
“The world that I represent,” he says, “is small-town Britain, people who have a very strong sense of place and love our country. My family were fiercely patriotic, we didn’t denigrate our history, we were proud of our history. And that is what I think the Conservative Party should stand for.
“We should be defending those values and we shouldn’t be embarrassed about those values, because I do believe, even in the aftermath of this terrible election defeat, that there’s a majority of people in this country who share those values and are crying out for a party that is willing to stand up for them.”
'My family were fiercely patriotic and proud of our history. That is what the Conservative Party should stand for' CREDIT: Jeff Gilbert
Might that party be Reform UK? “Reform is a symptom, not the cause,” he says. “The problem is that the Conservative Party made promises on immigration and then failed to deliver them. And we have to repent for that and begin the long road to win back people’s trust and confidence.
“I think we can do that, but we have to get serious and show that the party is under new management on immigration. We can do that by having a legal cap on net migration at 100,000.”
Jenrick believes that part of the reason he retained his seat when every other Conservative MP in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire was defeated – and despite numerous pre-election polls predicting he would lose – is because he took a stand on immigration.
Last year, he resigned from Sunak’s government because, as immigration minister, he could see that the plan to send illegal migrants to Rwanda to claim asylum would not work unless Sunak took a tougher line with the courts and the European Convention on Human Rights.
“They saw precious few politicians having the balls to stand up and fight,” he says. “I mean, certainly nobody else in the Cabinet was willing to take a stand on immigration.”
Although he doesn’t name any names, the unspoken message is that leadership rivals Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat did not take a similar stand.
Jenrick believes that Britain should leave the European Convention on Human Rights – “no ifs, no buts” – and he has been outspoken about the threat of Islamist extremists to democracy.
Metropolitan types have framed his arguments as “very Right wing”, he says, but he is adamant that: “These are mainstream views. These are views held by millions of people across our country. What the Conservative Party has to do is understand what mainstream opinion in this country actually is, and make sure it’s on the side of working people.”
Sunak’s decision to call an early election was, Jenrick says, a mistake. He believes that if Sunak had waited until the first flights to Rwanda had taken off, the election would have been far closer, but he also believes that people at the top of government were not serious about making the policy work.
At a meeting in the Cabinet room in No 10 just before Christmas, he sat with Sunak, home secretary James Cleverly, foreign secretary Lord Cameron, Lord Chancellor Alex Chalk and attorney general Victoria Prentis, and felt that “everybody around the table knew this policy wasn’t going to work” but that he was the only one willing to say it.
What, then, is his prescription for curing the Tory Party’s chronic malaise? “I never want to be knocking on doors in a general election campaign again and meeting people who don’t know what the Conservative Party stands for,” he says. “In 2019, we said we would get Brexit done, deliver strong borders, a strong economy, a strong NHS.
“We did get Brexit done, but we did not deliver the NHS and the quality of public services that people expect; we didn’t deliver the low taxes and a level of economic growth and living standards that hardworking people demand; and we certainly didn’t deliver a secure border and the controlled and reduced immigration that we had promised.
“And that has left a lot of people feeling angry, frustrated and disappointed by the Conservative Party. My mission now is to begin the long road of restoring trust for those people who have voted Reform, to bring them back home to the Conservative Party. I want the Conservative Party to be the natural home for small-C conservatives across this country. Hard-working people, earning a living, trying to look after their families, paying their mortgage. And the Conservative Party needs to have a fierce loyalty to people like that.”
The person who takes over from Sunak will also need to end the melodrama in the party, he says, and while he is wise enough not to criticise any of his rivals by name, he points out that “I’m not somebody who likes to sound off”, a clear reference to the pre-election attacks on Sunak by Braverman, and the post-election attacks on Sunak and Braverman by Badenoch.
“It isn’t a game,” he says. “You have to approach it seriously.” I ask what he makes of Braverman’s recent claims that he is a Left-winger, and he will only say that he has “been friends with Suella since we met at freshers week at university” and is “never going to say a bad word” about her.
Jenrick’s concerns about the rise of Islamist extremism are informed partly by the fact that his three daughters, Marina, 12, Sophia, 10, and Lila, eight, are being brought up in the Jewish faith.
His wife, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, was born in Israel and moved with her family to New York when she was eight, where her father set up a furniture business (like Jenrick’s father, he still goes to work every day despite being in his 80s).
They met when Jenrick was working at the auction house Christie’s, having decided he wanted to work in business rather than the law, and when they had children they decided they wanted them to be connected with both their Jewish and their Christian heritage.
“It’s complicated,” he smiles. “We took them to see the Chief Rabbi, and he said they were like the blank page between the Old Testament and the New Testament, which I later discovered he’d stolen off Queen Victoria!”
They attend both synagogue and church at various times, and celebrate both Christian and Jewish holidays. “It basically involves a lot of holidays and a lot of food,” he says. Weekends are typically spent taking them on walks in the nearby Derbyshire dales, going to see Nottingham Forest football in the winter and cricket at Trent Bridge in the summer.
Like any MP, he must also find time to meet and represent his constituents, and Jenrick has a novel approach to that side of the job. He holds Question Time-style events in local pubs, and holds surgeries at Asda and McDonald’s, sometimes at night.
“If I do it in the evenings, I meet shift workers stopping off on their way home,” he says. Newark has plenty of those, as it has a cake factory that operates 24/7 supplying many of the major supermarkets, as well as a Currys distribution and repair centre and a sugar processing plant.
“It works far better than holding surgeries in an office,” he adds. “People who haven’t made appointments stop and chat, so it’s far better than just seeing people one by one.”
He also organises £15 coach trips for constituents to visit Parliament, taking 100 at a time, once a month, who are given a tour of the Palace of Westminster before meeting Jenrick in a committee room, where they can ask him questions. He reckons 9,000 of his constituents have done this so far, more than a tenth of the entire electorate in the seat, which must surely have contributed to him bucking the trend of lost Tory seats in the Midlands.
“We offer coach trips to people in a different village or ward each time, and they always sell out,” he says. For some of those who make the trip, it is the first time they have been to London.
In Jenny’s, a local greasy spoon café where Jenrick is a regular, we have breakfast before our interview. The ladies behind the counter tell him they were toying with voting Reform but were persuaded to stick with him partly because of his pre-election visits there.
“I must admit, I didn’t think we’d see you again once the election was over!” says the middle-aged woman behind the counter as she takes our order for bacon rolls. Bobby Brown, a 59-year-old carpenter born and bred in Newark who has popped in for a cuppa on his way to work, says he was thinking of voting Green but decided to stick with Jenrick because: “Rob’s been a good MP. I’ve had issues and he was easily contactable and he resolved them.”
The customers of Jenny’s seem persuaded, then. All Jenrick has to do now is work the same magic on the Tory membership and, before that, his fellow Conservative MPs.
Will he definitely run?
“It’s only a fortnight after the worst election result for the Conservative Party in our history,” he says. “We all need to reflect on how that happened. I’m talking to colleagues in Parliament and those who have lost their seats.”
I’m going to stick my neck out and take that as a yes.