Robert Jenrick's Missing X-Factor

I suppose someone on the left has to keep tabs on the Tory leadership contest. This afternoon Robert Jenrick took to the stage to launch his bid for the top job. And ... he wasn't very impressive. There is definitely something of the right about Jenrick, but his delivery is as dead eyed and clod-footed as anyone from the New Labour school of media training. And, most importantly for the defeated Tories, he hasn't a Scooby.

Because this is a Tory leadership contest, Jenrick was at least aware he wasn't addressing the country. With a crowded field, he's hoping a pitch to the membership will build a groundswell of Association-level pressure on enough MPs to get him into the final four in September, and then the last two for the party-wide ballot. As such, Jenrick's effusing of "hard working activists" and all the rest was almost embarrassing. But what might have made the Tories' diminishing support pick up its ears was his defence of members having the final say over who gets to be leader, and for good measure he said selections should be their preserve as well. Somewhat optimistically, he said the Tories can be a mass membership organisation and, because the Tories won among young people in 2010 (not 18-24s, by the way) they can again.

Official optimism bordering on the delusional, considering what's just happened. But it's okay, because Jenrick has some "hard truths" the party must learn. He said two thirds of Tory MPs lost their seats through "no fault of their own". Poor lambs. They did because, despite having an excellent record in government, the Tories didn't keep its promises. There might be a universe where those two points marry up, but it's not this one. The main reason for the defeat was that most faithful of right wing friends; not controlling immigration and failing to secure the borders. That's not the whole story, according to Jackanory Jenrick. They did not build a strong and resilient economy, and they never got to grips with the NHS. What's happened to the economy had absolutely nothing to do with them, but the NHS did. Jenrick argued that too much of the British state isn't working. It's riddled with waste and inefficiencies. Poor management is its hallmark, and it needlessly soaks up never ending amounts of money. This malaise causes the problems with the NHS (front line staff are "lions" led by "back office donkeys"), but tackling it was too hard. So it was ducked.

Jenrick has a cheek. It was Rishi Sunak who led opposition to Boris Johnson's luke warm efforts at addressing the country's long-term structural problems. And wherever his penny pinching touch went, departmental budgets were pared down, infrastructure projects scrapped, public sector wages forced below inflation, and a stated intention to reduce the capability of the state to do things further. This wasn't dogma or "ideology", though it's often dressed up in those terms. It was a class conscious effort to curb raised political expectations after Corbynism, Covid, and Johnson's pie-in-the-sky promises. Defund the state, preside over its decay, and erode popular perceptions of its efficacy. Labour are attempting a different approach that involves enhancing the reputation of the state and rebuilding its capacity, but Jenrick wants to take it a step further. He's blaming the state itself for what his party have done to it, and the medicine he's prescribing is more of the same. The "British system isn't working for the British people" is the logical consequence of Tory design. His party is responsible for the shambles.

There were a few swipes at Labour (dishonest for raising taxes) and, weirdly, the "far left" (anti-British!). But while both offer something different, depending on one's political tastes, like a true conservative Jenrick's solutions are the same old same old. People and parliament should be sovereign (no ECHR), fast track deportations, immigration in the tens of thousands "or lower", build more nuclear, more money for the army, cut welfare, a small state "that works". I guess you'd have to be a Tory member to find this exciting.

But there are two problems. The long term issue is none of this is appropriate to the situation the Tories have bequeathed their successors. The audience for reheated Thatcherism is literally dying, are not being replaced like for like, and even those who might move into opposition against the new government aren't likely to turn to the Tories because of that inconvenient thing called memory. But more immediately, how does this differentiate Jenrick from his competitors? As we will see when other candidates are profiled here, you'll be hard pressed to find substantive differences between them. Whether they are from the identikit right, like Jenrick, or the briefcase/sensible "centre". What has Jenrick got that Badenoch and Patel haven't? Likewise how does he present as a more capable "safe pair of hands" unifier than Cleverly? It's a mystery to me, and I expect the Tory membership will have a hard time differentiating him as well.

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