The mysterious rise of Robert Jenrick

One of the most telling things about Robert Jenrick is that many people have met him over the years, but few of them have anything to say about it. A friend of a friend went to university with him and knows, intellectually, that their overlapping interests meant that they must have spent a lot of time in the same rooms, but they just cannot recall him even existing.

Another friend technically knew him at the time but once apologised for her inability to produce any gossip about him. The only thing she could vaguely remember was that he had been asked by some student paper to talk about his ideal future job, and had said “prime minister”. The vignette had stuck in her mind because everyone at the time, apparently, found it very funny.

Are any of them still laughing now, though? It seems unlikely that Jenrick will ever get the keys to Downing Street, but he did manage to become an MP, then a minister, a member of cabinet, and now one of the last two candidates to become Conservative party leader. It’s not a bad CV.

It’s also not wholly clear how he managed to get to where he is today. Many people in Westminster and on Twitter have gleefully nicknamed him Robert Generic, as so little about him seems to stand out. Having seen him speak multiple times before, he isn’t especially charismatic. His personal life story doesn’t exactly sparkle, and nothing in his career feels worth singling out as impressive, or at least intriguing.

As for his views… well, if you don’t like them, don’t worry! By this time tomorrow, he’ll have others. Robert Jenrick campaigned against Brexit in 2016 and now he wants Britain to leave the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice. He seemed at home within the moderate wing of the party for a long time but now goes on about immigration with the fervour of a jumped-up Reform MP.

Crucially, no one seems to know him well enough to say, with any sense of certainty, whether his shift to the right is due to a genuine change of heart, or was merely a consequence of the changing direction of travel of his party. Has he got radicalised? Is he being cynical? Both? Neither? So far, there has been no way to tell.

What is worth mentioning, however, is just how extreme some of his views have become. “If I were an American citizen, I would be voting for Donald Trump,” he said in an interview only last month. That only the most fringe of Tory MPs said the same in 2016 should be pointed out, again and again. That Trump has only been getting more overtly fascistic since then must also be noted.

Elsewhere, he has said that Britain’s foreign aid budget should be cut in half and that there should be an annual cap of 10,000 on visas issued to immigrants. Again, a Conservative politician with a policy platform like his would have been languishing in the wilderness not even a decade ago. In 2024, he managed to become one of the most popular candidates for the party’s leadership.

That he is incredibly unlikely to ever become Prime Minister and only somewhat likely to become leader of the opposition provides some comfort, but does not mean that he can be safely ignored. If anything, his lack of charisma and personality make his unexpected rise arguably more worrying.

It was possible to loathe Boris Johnson but recognise that, well, some people do love Marmite, that’s the whole point. Jenrick is bland, broadly uninteresting, and has little intellectual consistency. The only thing he has going for him is that he is very, very right-wing. What does it say about our current political sphere that he may be about to become the voice of the opposition?

The very fact that he is where he is today shows us that the Overton window has, over time, been slowly but surely creeping ever further to the right. That is something that should concern both progressives and liberals, even if they currently want to rest on their laurels just for a little while. Labour may have won the election over the summer, but harmful, populist voices will keep playing the long game, and aren’t going anywhere.