KEMY BADENOCH must be fuming. She was having quite a good week – made some strong points at and even got some jokes into Prime Minister’s Question Time, and looking like a Conservative Party Leader. Then it all went wrong.
Kemi hadn’t even had her lunchtime steak when her major news was announced: she had sacked Tory MP Robert Jenrick from the Shadow Cabinet, where he had been Secretary of State for Justice and Shadow Lord Chancellor. The sacking came after Kemi found out that Jenrick was planning to leave the Tories and join Reform. Apparently he had left some papers out which were found and which gave the game away.
Robert Jenrick is well known to Tower Hamlets pundits. Back in 2021, Mace Developments put forward a planning application to Tower Hamlets Council, on behalf of Northern & Shell, to develop a large site on the Isle of Dogs which had previously been occupied by Westferry Printers. The Council turned down the application – a decision later upheld by the Planning Inspector. Robert Jenrick then stepped in and granted the company planning permission.
Northern & Shell was founded by Richard Desmond. It was a publishing company, known for publishing various pornographic magazines for much of its life. It later turned out that Jenrick granted the planning application just weeks after Desmond had made a donation to the Conservative Party. The Council was also cross because Jenrick’s decision was made hours before the Council met to discuss a plan to increase the amount of money developers had to pay in community benefits intended to compensate the local community for the disruption the regeneration would cause. Jenrick had to do a U-turn and un-grant the planning permission on the grounds that the decision could look as if he was biased. The issue was reconsidered by a fellow Tory Minister, who turned the application down.
In addition to his brush with Tower Hamlets, Mr Jenrick is known for his traditional-Tory, right wing views. He was Minister of State for Immigration at the tail end of Rishi Sunak’s Tory Government – resigning six months before the General Election because the Government’s plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda did not go far enough. Jenrick is also ambitious. He stood for Leader of the Conservative Party after the last General Election and finished the contest as runner up to Kemi Badenoch, the woman who sacked him today.
Before teatime, Nigel Farage had organised a press conference and announced that Robert Jenrick had joined the Reform Party – an announcement somewhat marred because as Farage introduced Jenrick, it turned out Jenrich was not in the room. Someone had to go to look for him.
Policy-wise, Jenrick will be at home in Reform. He shares Farage’s hard right views on scapegoating migrants. Farage is the darling of US President Trump, and Jenrick, after doing his first degree at Cambridge, studied study political science at the University of Pennsylvania in the USA (who knows what ideas he picked up there). Jenrick is the MP for Newark, solid East Midlands Reform territory. Miners in Newark were strong supporters of the “Union of Democratic Minerworkers”, a trade union lookalike set up to undermine the National Union of Miners during the 1984-85 coal dispute.
Career-wise, is this a strange move. If Badenoch loses the next General Election, Jenrick could have had another go at becoming Leader. Was he, at the age of 44, just too impatient to wait until 2029? Or did he believe that Reform gave him more of a platform in the here and now? Farage would be pleased to have Jenrick in a Reform Government, and there has even been talk today that Jenrick would have been Reform’s Leader-in-Waiting.
Farage was supposed to be organising a political movement on the lines of the Trump MAGA movement: looking for easy answers and easy scapegoats. The populists were relying on Boris Johnson to MAGA-ise British voters, but that plan didn’t work out, so Farage was called back from retirement to deliver Plan B – Reform. For Reform to win and then to govern, it has to pinch the best talent from the Tories to bring some practical political skill to the White Van Man membership. By poaching top Tories, Reform will weaken its electoral opponent at the same time.
Jenrick has taken a big political gamble. As Tower Hamlets residents know well, gambles don’t always go to plan.
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