Just why is bandwagon-jumper Robert Jenrick so popular with Tory members?

Congratulations to Robert Jenrick for winning the recent Conservative Home reader survey to decide the 2024 MP of the Year. With 127 votes, Jenrick narrowly beat the current Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, who only managed 121. It was already fairly clear that Bobby J sees himself as Tory leader in waiting – this latest result will only stiffen his resolve.

What’s the secret of his success? Insightful policy analysis? A bold, clear-eyed stance on the deepest challenges facing Britain and the world? Er, no. According to ConHome, Jenrick’s success is down to his instinctive understanding that “a minister can build a relatively strong public profile on the basis of a relatively small number of well-judged interventions on favoured topics”.

In other words, he’s good at making headlines in the Telegraph – which is perhaps not surprising as he is now employed pretty much full time as one of its comment writers. This month alone he has already had four articles published in the paper.

But the thing that really led Jenrick to victory, Conservative Home noted, is that he “has been by far the most energetic and high-profile shadow minister over the past few months, especially on the grooming gangs scandal”.

Jenrick has certainly had a lot to say in recent weeks about the grooming scandal, not least in the Telegraph where one of his columns on the subject screamed that “the truth about ‘grooming gangs’ is finally coming out”, followed promptly with another, under the headline: “Starmer is fuelling perceptions of a grooming gang cover up”.

He’s certainly been making a lot of noise on the subject. It’s a shame, however, that he had almost nothing to say about it when he was an actual minister in government, which he was from 2018-23, during which time he might have been able to do something about it.

But a review of his Telegraph columns from that period shows that, when he was in office, he didn’t mention the subject at all. Could it be that his decision to jump on the subect of “grooming gangs” was a piece of gross political opportunism, and that the only reason he did so was because Elon Musk starting posting on X about it? Perish the thought.