Rats in a Sack: The mystery of Robert Jenrick’s baseball cap

Your correspondent contacted Jenrick’s campaign team but, for some strange reason, they didn’t respond. Is this cap official campaign merchandise? Will it be available to buy from his website? What colour is it? If you see a Bobby J cap in the wild, please take a snap and email it in.

Rival Tom Tugendhat’s team, meanwhile, provided supporters with foam fingers, like in the audience at Gladiators, at his campaign (re)launch on Tuesday. Introducing Tommy T, Harriet Cross, a new Scottish Tory MP, described him as “heir to Disraeli, Macmillan and also Thatcher”. Alas history does not record if any of those launched their leadership campaigns with foam fingers.

“Is Priti Patel, the former home secretary with the ‘perma-smirk’, the woman to rebuild the Tories?,” ran the standfirst on a six-page interview in the Sunday Times Magazine at the weekend.

Well, no – she was the first candidate to be rejected after winning the backing of just 14 fellow Tory MPs. Not only is this a blow for Patel, but it’s also another setback for the increasingly unemployable Jonathan Gullis, who ran her ground operations.

The avocado-loathing former Stoke-on-Trent North MP took to his role with gusto, personally handing out the branded tote bags, t-shirts, placards and baseball caps (what’s with the baseball caps?) at her launch, clearly angling for a senior role in LOTO – the leader of the opposition’s office – after a Patel victory. That’s now not going to happen.

And what of his presenting stint on Talk (the former TalkTV, which is no longer on TV)? Gullis’s first episode got 5,000 viewers on YouTube. It’s not too late to return to the classroom, Jonathan…

The most low-profile of the contenders, Mel Stride, must have been confident of getting through to the second round. He’s still yet to hold his launch event.

Conservative leaders have traditionally always had difficulties with their irksome backbenchers, Fortunately the next incumbent will have less of an issue in that regard – there’ll hardly be any!

88 Labour MPs currently hold ministerial office (not including whips or peers who are ministers). Were the Tories to match that person-for-person it would only leave 33 backbenchers – a grouping so weak lobby hacks won’t even be bothering holding glasses up to the wall of the 1922 Committee’s weekly grumblefests.

As such, the new leader might have to ditch man-marking for something a tad more zonal, with shadow ministers forced to take on more than one portfolio. The last time that happened was under Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership, when so few MPs were willing to serve that the likes of Paul Flynn had to act as both shadow leader of the House and shadow Wales secretary. What an example to follow!

The British right has already started attacking Keir Starmer for still blaming the Tories for all the nation’s ills despite having had a full two months in office to sort them out himself. On the US right, however, they take a somewhat longer view.

“If Churchill is a hero, how come there are British girls begging for drugs on the streets of London?” mused Tucker Carlson on his online talk show this week. Winston Churchill has not been prime minister for 69 years.

Former chancellor (budgets delivered: zero) Nadhim Zahawi is already a multimillionaire, with a fortune estimated at anything up to £100m, and since departing Westminster has taken up a lucrative job as the Very Group’s non-executive chair.

So it’s fortunate he’s not relying on sales of his memoir as his post-politics retirement. For The Boy From Baghdad: My Journey from Waziriyah to Westminster is selling like cold cakes.

At the time of writing it is Amazon’s 816th best-selling book. It is number one on the ‘Middle Eastern Historical Biographies’ chart but, given that top 10 also includes Ollie Ollerton’s Break Point: SAS: Who Dares Wins Host’s Incredible True Story and Bernie Collins’ How to Win a Grand Prix: From Pit Lane to Podium, it’s dubious how much of an honour that is.

Should Conservative leaders be allowed to go on holiday? For the Daily Telegraph’s Camilla Tominey the answer is absolutely clear – it depends on whether you’re a Tory leader she likes or not.

Attacking Rishi Sunak – who, you might have read, is not actually prime minister any more – Tominey wrote in her column this week: “Rishi Sunak, still the leader of the opposition despite the ongoing race to appoint his successor, is nowhere to be seen. His engagement has been confined to a few posts on X, perhaps sent from an expensive Californian sunbed.”

And what was her response in October 2021, when Boris Johnson – who actually was the prime minister at the time – was criticised for jetting off on one of his many holidays, this time to Marbella?

“We hear from Downing St aides that he’s exhausted and that he deserves a holiday, and do you know what? It might be controversial but I think I concur with that view,” she told listeners to her LBC show.

“I don’t really like holiday-shaming. I don’t like this talk of ‘Oh he’s gone on holiday when he should be running the country’. I mean he’s got to have a break, right? He’s prime minister.”

Nadine Dorries, meanwhile, is fuming that Angela Rayner was snapped partying in Ibiza earlier this month.

“I’m not sure how many of Rayner’s constituents in Ashton-under-Lyne could afford to spend their summer break ‘going large’ like her in a club where the water costs £11 a bottle – and, more to the point, I’m not at all sure that’s how they want their elected representative spending her time just weeks into the job,” she wrote in her well-remunerated Daily Mail column.

Quite right! Perhaps Rayner should follow the example of a conscientious MP who (a) went AWOL from Parliament to appear on I’m a Celebrity… having not informed her party, leading her to be temporarily suspended, and (b) failed to speak in Parliament for her final 14 months in office due to a lengthy sulk over not being given the peerage she thought was her right.

That MP was, of course… Nadine Dorries!

While the rest of the country remains blissfully unaware of the fact that the Conservative Party is having one of its seemingly biennial leadership elections, for the Daily Express it’s the Euros, Olympics and Wimbledon all rolled into one.

But its dwindling readership must be confused as to which way to vote such is the mixed messaging emanating from its page. Headlines in just the last few days alone have included “Robert Jenrick will resonate with voters for one key reason”, “Robert Jenrick is the candidate to lead the Tories towards change” and, er, “Please God – do not let Robert Jenrick become Tory leader”. Plus there’s “There is only one outstanding Tory leadership candidate – and it’s not James Cleverly”, “Priti Patel has the courage to win back voters” and the rather hopeful “Kemi Badenoch can turn around Tory fortunes in just one term”.

Express readers must be even more confused than usual…

More than two months in as an MP and Nigel Farage has yet to hold his first constituency surgery in Clacton, and one of his closest allies has quietly let slip he might not bother.

“The voters of Clacton voted for a superstar not a social worker and that’s what they’ve got in Farage – he can sprinkle Disney dust on Clacton,” Andy Wigmore, the Leave.EU director of communications and self-styled Bad Boy of Brexit, told ITV News.

That must be great news for residents of the town – one of the country’s most deprived – struggling with benefits payments or rogue landlords. Let them eat (Mickey Mouse embossed) cake!

Ukip, who unaccountably still exist, this week announced their exciting new policy to end illegal migration to the UK – build a wall in the English Channel.

“Ukip pledges to build a sea wall,” the party announced on social media. “The public have had enough. We will give patriots and families what they want. We are going to build a sea wall.”

The vow – accompanied by an image of a stone harbour mole – was signed with the name of Ben Walker, the party’s chairman. You might think that a man who boasts of six years’ service in the Royal Mail might have paused to muse on the viability of building a wall across the world’s busiest seaway – more than 500 ships pass through each day – but apparently not.

Keir Starmer “rode roughshod over the Magna Carta” over the prosecution of those people protesting the horrific murders in Southport by kicking in the windows of JD Sports, former Tory MP Dame Andrea Jenkyns told – who else! – GB News last week.

Leaving aside whether she’s right or wrong – although she is, as ever, wrong – we must, once again, correct one of our foremost public intellectuals on Magna Carta. It’s just Magna Carta, Dame Andrea. Not the Magna Carta. Did she die in vain?