A "New Sherrif in Town": The radicalisation of Robert Jenrick

The journey of Robert Jenrick from moderate Remain-supporting Cameroon to hardline culture warrior and defector to Reform UK serves as a parable of contemporary conservatism. Like many on the right, Jenrick has been radicalised by what he considers to be the breakdown of the British state, uncontrolled immigration, and the so-called “Boriswave”, the surge in non-EU migration from 2021 to 2024. Plus, let’s not forget, his failure to win the Conservative leadership in 2024.

Despite what he says now, in the months following that defeat to Kemi Badenoch, he was already open to defecting to Reform. In January last year, during a meeting with a prominent Conservative figure at the private members club 5 Hertford St in London, Jenrick was asked whether he would ever quit the Tories. He responded by saying that he wanted to ensure that the right could win the next election. “He said to me that the most important thing is that we fix the country and for him that comes before politics and party,” the source recalls now. “I took that to mean that he wasn’t wedded to the Conservative Party.”

Jenrick had resigned in frustration as immigration minister under Rishi Sunak in 2023. Since then, he has only sharpened and hardened his diagnosis of what he calls “broken Britain”, a slogan popularised by David Cameron during the 2010 general election campaign and later abandoned but now revived by Jenrick in his latest incarnation as a cheerleader for the radical right.

Despite his popularity among Conservative members, Jenrick was widely disliked by many Conservative MPs, even before he was sacked as shadow justice secretary on Thursday. They accused him of overweening ambition, opportunism, and relentless scheming and disloyalty - particularly to Badenoch. He, in turn, believes the Conservative Party is “rotten” to its core.

All of that may be true. Yet when I visited Jenrick, who is 44, in his parliamentary office last summer, what struck me most was his fervour – and his physical transformation. His hair was shorter, his suit well-cut and, as a convert to Ozempic and strenuous exercise routines (hiking, marathon-running and so on), he was far leaner than the bland, portly figure who first entered parliament after winning the Newark by-election in 2014. “Robert Generic” had reinvented himself. But who was he now?

His aides spoke to me about his new approach - “guerilla politics” and “direct action”, they called it. One of his gonzo video stunts in which he was filmed challenging fare dodgers on the London Underground had been a recent viral hit. They were delighted about that.

Jenrick wanted to harness the energy of the younger online right and “capture the zeitgeist”. In his view, the country was turning right, the Labour government was already doomed, the doctrine of multiculturalism had failed, and the two main parties were trapped by old orthodoxies. It was no longer enough, his aides told me, for mainstream politicians to explain why trust in politics was at an all-time low; they had to offer bold solutions to public service reform, mass migration, rising crime, and the cost-of-living crisis.

That afternoon Jenrick and I discussed political ideas and the coming realignment on the right, what some are calling the New Settlement. The phrase “broken Britain” was repeatedly used. At times, especially when he spoke about the chaos in Birmingham, where rubbish lay uncollected in the streets and rotting in the summer heat, I was reminded of the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, evoking a vision of Gotham city on the edge of collapse. But Jenrick was deadly serious.

His political, philosophical and indeed physical makeover were not merely cosmetic but in the service of a plan. Like JD Vance, once a “Never-Trumper”, Jenrick has what Tom McTague, editor of the New Statesman, calls a “project”. Formerly a liberal Conservative, close to George Osborne, Jenrick aspires to be the parliamentary standard-bearer of the ideological new right, much as Vance has emerged as the political leader of the post-liberal national populist new right in America. Jenrick was among a small group of Conservatives who met Vance when he was on holiday in the Cotswolds last summer; Danny Kruger, Jenrick’s leadership campaign manager who has since defected to Reform, was present at the meeting.

In person, Jenrick is courteous but in public his language has coarsened. Like Farage, he will go as far as he thinks he needs to court controversy and attract attention to his anti-immigration causes. His casual comment at the Reform press conference on Thursday describing people dependent on welfare as “scroungers” was characteristic of this new abrasive approach.

The Jenrick strategy revealed

Last summer, the conventional wisdom at Westminster was that Badenoch would fail and be swiftly replaced by Jenrick. It hasn’t turned out like that. Badenoch’s performances have become more burnished as her confidence has grown. You could see from Jenrick’s public response – his strained expression, the over-eager applause - to her well-received speech at the Conservative Party conference in October that he knew Badenoch was safe. She would not be toppled any time soon. The question was: how would he respond. We know now.

When precisely he made the decision to defect remains known only to him and his inner circle. Before the conference, he had already discussed joining Reform with Tim Montgomerie, as the former editor of the ConservativeHome website who is now an adviser to Farage confirmed on BBC Newsnight on Friday.

However, internal planning documents from his own team – “discovered” by team Badenoch and now leaked to my colleague Harry Yorke of the Sunday Times – show that Nadhim Zahawi’s defection on Monday prompted Jenrick to rapidly draw up a detailed media strategy that included holding a press conference as Reform’s newest MP. Given the reference to Zahawi in the mock Q&A section in the document (which was either leaked to Badenoch from someone close to Jenrick or uncovered by a Badenoch “stooge” after Jenrick’s office was left unlocked during a shadow cabinet meeting) it is clear he intended to defect within a matter of days, on his own terms, had Badenoch not intervened.

The document, printed on A4 paper, includes many annotations and suggested tweaks written in black pen by Jenrick himself, and reveals far more than his public comments in recent days.

Page one, titled “overview”, notes that while “your [Jenrick's] persona will shift to some extent across the early days post-jump, there are fundamentals which you should abide by.” It goes on to state that Jenrick is the “biggest defection story Reform has ever had (and likely ever will be), the most popular Tory shadow cabinet member, leader-in-waiting if Kemi ever falls and the most dynamic politician in the Conservative Party”.

It describes Jenrick as the “new sheriff in town, here to provide experience and political heft to Reform’s operation”, but it stresses he is there to “support Nigel”, a point Jenrick personally underlined in pen.

The plan is so detailed that it even has a section entitled “Method”, listing exhaustively the tone and approach that he should take to certain media questions. They include how to deal with rhetorical questions, using anecdotes from meeting members of the public, and even conveying the right “demonstrative” body language “in particular hands”.

The end of the document is dedicated to second guessing the questions that Jenrick should expect from the media, including those about his “naked ambition” and whether he defected because of “sour grapes/Kemi doing well”.

It also reveals that Jenrick and his team were concerned that his previous attacks on Farage could be turned against him: one hypothetical question states “you have said Nigel can’t run the country, that he’s only good for a pint – what’s changed?”

The final question was devoted to Zahawi’s defection, confirming the document was only prepared in recent days, asking whether Jenrick supported it and would “welcome more Tories to Reform”.

“It’s not for me to talk about any limits, that’s Nigel prerogative and I’ve just got here,” is the suggested answer for Jenrick to provide, with him scribbling underneath: “quickly go into mission: country is broken…”.

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Who is Robert Jenrick and why does he seem to be in such a hurry? He has spoken about the common decency of his parents and his “working class” upbringing in the market town of Shifnal, Shropshire. His father set up a small business making fireplaces and his mother was a secretary from Liverpool. Jenrick went to Wolverhampton Grammar School (which became fee-paying in 1978) and was the first in his family to go to university (history at Cambridge). He later worked as a corporate lawyer at Skaddens in the City of London and is a former director of Christie’s auction house. He is married to a high-powered corporate lawyer, Michal Berkner, an American-Israeli and former Skaddens colleague who is now a partner at Baker McKenzie.

Berkner, the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, is nine years older than Jenrick. She is described as formidable and “a force of nature”; at the 2024 Conservative Party conference, she wore a necklace inscribed with “wifey” and attended meetings with her husband. Together they have three daughters – and an extensive property portfolio.

Jenrick is an anti-establishment populist who rose within several different establishments, political, legal, corporate. But now he has joined the people’s army. To thrive, even survive, in Reform, he will have to submit to the will and authority of Farage, who in the past has dismissed Jenrick as a “fraud”. Reform is less a team of rivals than it is first and foremost the Farage show. Can Jenrick, the self-styled new sheriff in town, tolerate that?

Inside Reform, allies of Farage worry that Jenrick’s arrival could yet again unsettle Zia Yusuf, who is the only senior Reform leader not to issue a public statement welcoming his arrival. Last summer Yusuf, formerly of Goldman Sachs, resigned and then promptly returned amid tensions with some of his parliamentary colleagues.

He wants to be chancellor and is now in a three-way tussle with Jenrick and deputy leader Richard Tice, with Farage in no hurry to confirm his pick.

“My concern is how do we square the circle,” one ally said. “There has been such clear hostility between Zia and Rob. Zia loyalists are becoming concerned that they are being boxed out with a clique of old Tories, and I am concerned that he could quit again.”

Where Jenrick aligns with Reform hardliners is on immigration. “By 2030,” he has said, “almost a quarter of the population will have been born outside the UK. I think that’s an astonishing statistic. There aren’t many successful countries in the world like that – cohesive, integrated countries.”

The new dissident online right is obsessed with demography, race and societal decline. Much of its rhetoric is repellent, yet it is seeping into the mainstream. Farage is adept at channelling while also containing the forces of the dissident right. “I’ve done more than anyone else to hold back the far right in this country,” he has said to me repeatedly over the years.

As Farage moderates his positions - describing himself now as “centre right” or, as he once put it to me, “not left or right but a radical” - Jenrick has moved in the opposite direction, away from the liberal centre and towards the hard right of the Conservative Party and now out of it. How far right will the new sheriff in town go? It’s one of the strangest journeys in contemporary politics and Badenoch is delighted that he is no longer her problem.

After a turbulent week, Jenrick now finds himself alongside Farage, a longtime antagonist, in Reform. His challenge is to persuade his sceptical new colleagues that he is much more than a self-serving opportunist or Tory turncoat: that he is one of them, a true believer, and can lead the realignment of the right while condemning the Conservative Party to irrelevance.

Additional reporting: Harry Yorke