Inside Robert Jenrick's New Right revolution

New Statesman​

09-07-2025

There is a story being told about Robert Jenrick. It runs like this: shortly after 7 October 2023, and shortly before he resigned as immigration minister from his friend Rishi Sunak's government, he was with his three daughters, who have an American Jewish mother, when all four of them were caught up in a pro-Palestine march. They were in some sense surrounded – that, at least, is how they felt. It is said to have been a crystallising moment for Jenrick. It was when he realised that Britain was becoming a very different country to the one in which he grew up, and it was time to stand, as many a conservative has, against that tide and athwart history.
It is a story that seems to have acquired its own momentum, transforming in the telling. When I asked Jenrick to tell it to me, he struggled, whether out of reluctance or an inability to recount what didn't quite happen. An incidental encounter has spiralled into something mythical; something that speaks to the fears many on the British right now harbour – of cultural alienation and physical displacement. Jenrick should not be considered synonymous with the burgeoning online right, but they are finding in him someone to believe in, whether or not he believes in them.
Others, from a very different wing of the Conservative tradition, are finding reason to believe in him too. He recently had lunch with David Cameron and George Osborne, the last architects of a successful Tory revival, at Oswald's in Mayfair. They swapped war stories and mused on Labour's fate. The pair also got a feel for him, testing his progress, and assessing how much substance there was to a man who has been an MP for 11 years and is only now beginning to emerge as a national figure. He impressed them.
Multiple people involved in the Cameron project 20 years ago see something in Jenrick. It is a mistake to look on him in bewilderment as a formerly 'full-fat subscriber to David Cameron' who has since betrayed that cause by straying towards Faragism. The truth is that the party itself is moving: Cameron would not be as liberal today as he was in 2005. 'A tougher world needs a tougher Tory message,' as one former cabinet minister put it to me. 'Circumstances have changed.' Cameron is known to respect Jenrick's passion and energy for the arduous, years-long fight of opposition.
Nigel Farage also recognises Jenrick's vim. 'I'll give him credit for some good videos, for trying hard,' Farage told me, before adding: 'But he can't get away from the record of the last 14 years.' He questions Jenrick's reinvention as the leader of the Tory right who now wants Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – 'If he is this modern-day convert, why is he having lunch with Cameron and Osborne?' – but Farage, too, may be mistaken in thinking Cameron and Jenrick are at opposite ends of the Conservative spectrum. Talk to Tory moderates and you will find far harder views on immigration and much else than any of them expressed in the 2010s.
Farage thinks Jenrick will 'almost certainly' end up to the right of him on migration by the next election: 'I suspect he will probably go further – that's just my instinct for someone who wants to make noise.' In fact, the Reform leader thinks he is to the left of the country on the issue. 'I haven't fought the change itself, provided it comes with integration,' he insisted, tacking to the centre in pursuit of power. Still, Farage thinks 'things have really shifted' in the country at large. As he seeks to moderate his image, the country – it seems – is radicalising. So is the Conservative Party.
This shift in Tory perspective is a product of what Ed Lister, Boris Johnson's longest-serving adviser inside No 10, described to me as the 'abject failure' of the points-based immigration system introduced by Johnson's government at the beginning of 2021. It led to the 'Boriswave', under which 4.5 million people immigrated to the UK in 2021-24. 'We thought it was going to reduce numbers and bring us the high-skilled people that we needed as a country,' Lister said. Jenrick now describes Johnson's rewriting of the immigration system as 'probably the worst public policy decision of my lifetime'.
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Today, even a Tory moderate like Lister sees the appeal of leaving the ECHR. He remembers being briefed in 2020 inside No 10 on how greatly Britain's membership of it had reduced the government's 'room for manoeuvre' in dealing with illegal migration. The Tory party was not ready to hear this then, but that has changed. The party is now expected to call for Britain to leave the ECHR this autumn, as Jenrick advocated a year ago. He has called for a 'Great Repeal Act' to unpick the latticework of laws, domestic and supranational, that hold back ministers.
At the centre of all these shifts lies a man unknown, if increasingly visible online after a series of viral videos. When Jenrick was elected in 2014, aged 32, having been a restless young solicitor and a director at Christie's, he struck journalists as 'nice and rather dull'. His subsequent path – housing secretary at 37, immigration minister at 40, odds-on favourite to lead the Tory party into the next election today – hasn't been a 'straight-line trajectory', as one quiet ally, again on the Tory left, puts it. But everyone, including his critics, recognises him as an able worker who absorbs himself in tasks, even if his career so far has been marked by a series of failures: to pass planning reform, to stand up the Rwanda plan, to become Tory leader.
I accompanied Jenrick on a recent trip to Birmingham – the centre of England, and the 'big smoke' for him as a boy, growing up as he did half an hour away in the small market town of Shifnal, west of Wolverhampton (population: 9,730). We spoke for an hour that day and an hour back in Westminster the following week. We talked about his parents, his influences, his experiences, his plans; about why some consider his political turn to be dangerous, about why he thinks such fears are outdated and corrosive in their own way.
He was willing to sift through the implications of his positions on immigration – he thinks migration the issue of his lifetime – although he was eager to move on to other aspects of what he sees as Britain's current mosaic of error; to show his range, his depth. His decision to give the New Statesman his first significant interview since losing the party leadership could, in itself, be read as a statement of his ambition. He was happy to follow the lead of my questions, which treated him as a candidate for prime minister and a future party leader. His brief as shadow justice secretary rarely came up. Kemi Badenoch, the current Tory leader, did not come up at all.
We met in late June. He was in Birmingham for 90 minutes, to tour a trade show at the National Exhibition Centre as part of a campaign he was waging on tool theft – the sort of issue MPs often raise and no one notices. But Jenrick's rapid rise to digital prominence had given him the scope to turn even minor issues into staple subjects. He had a firm handshake and an easy manner. There was something gentle but resolute about him.
I had watched him speak from the eyrie of the parliamentary press gallery in 2022. I can only recall how little impression he made on me. He is unquestionably a man transformed: physically as well as politically. Cherubic as a boy and chubby until two years ago, he's since slimmed down, Ozempic giving way to marathons and mountain walks. His suits, finely made by a tailoring house his team will not disclose, fit better now, his trousers falling, unlike Sunak's, at the right height against his black Oxford toe-cap brogues. His hair has been trimmed, his face has acquired lines of definition. Find a video of him more than three years old and you will see it. He has lost the nervous, earnest energy of his former self and acquired the zeal and conviction of a convert. But to what, exactly, has he converted?
A clip released by his team the previous day – in which Jenrick, pint in hand, shared concern over tool theft with a former Apprentice contestant who was once convicted for handling £40,000 worth of stolen goods – was on its way to being viewed four million times. He was accompanied by a videographer called Dov Forman. Forman, who is still at university, is the one-man production team behind Jenrick's algorithmic success. (Jenrick is his second major subject; his great-grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, was his first. As a teenager, he accrued two million TikTok followers by telling stories with her during the pandemic.) He shot Jenrick almost continuously as we walked.
Jenrick had attended fairs like these as a boy. His father had a business installing fireplaces and stoves, and Jenrick would dutifully man the company stand, bored out of his mind in an era before phones. That business – around which 'our whole family revolved', as Jenrick later put it – made £4,598 in profit in its first year, when Jenrick was five. It now makes £3m annually.
It is a tale of British business success, one far removed from the sorts of stories Jenrick has reached millions by telling online. He and Forman have cracked a nascent political art: putting out punchy, provocative vertical videos designed to go viral. 'How long should someone who's raped a child go to prison for?' 'We need to know the truth about who is committing crime in our country.' 'Why is it that Keir Starmer's Attorney General, Richard Hermer, represented all these clients?' Each one, a minute or two long, shows an impassioned Jenrick walking and talking to a moving camera, with clips, captions, cardboard cut-outs and occasional cameos deployed to fuel his point.
In his most-watched video, released on 29 May and seen 15 million times, he confronted fare dodgers on the London Underground. ('Sadiq Khan is… not acting. So, I did.') His opponents mocked him mercilessly for the stunt, although a plurality of Londoners say they are bothered by fare evaders. I was told the decision to accost people as they jumped the barriers – 'Excuse me, do you think it's all right not to pay?' – was made on the day by Jenrick. The plan had only been to film them. The videos capture something about the new visceral nature of modern British politics. The public, no longer content with speeches, have become intrigued by something more physical, more real. Jenrick is almost becoming the first gonzo politician, one more forceful on camera than in person.
I trailed him as he toured the fair, greeting tradesmen who had little idea who he was but appreciated his presence. He did not, unlike some leading politicians, struggle to talk to people he didn't know, though he still seemed out of place in such a room, in spite of his past.
I had heard him set out his vision for Britain at a conference the day before, one hosted by the Cambridge theologian James Orr, who knew Jenrick when both were corporate lawyers at the Sullivan & Cromwell law firm. Orr, who has since become a friend of JD Vance and Peter Thiel, spoke pungently that day of Britain's 'cultural disfigurement', a product, he argued, of an unholy alliance between 'rainbow and crescent' – woke culture and Islam – a phrase that is becoming part of the conservative mainstream. Orr spoke of 'the complicity of state and local government in covering up the torture and rape of tens of thousands of England's daughters by familial clans of racist foreigners deranged by misogyny and emboldened by theology'. England, he said, invoking Keir Starmer's tortured phrase, became 'a land of strangers' long ago.
This is the milieu Jenrick now exists alongside. He is not quite a part of it, nor exactly eager to free himself of it. It is, to its critics, the world of the neo-Powellites, who exist on 'Anglo Twitter', write pseudonymous blogs on the ethnic mix of social housing, and talk of the 'need to have adequate operational plans, and properly resourced teams, in order to effectively identify and remove' migrants, as Trump has sought to do in America.
Jenrick's speech, which preceded Orr's, was less vivid, even if it seemed to spring from a similar source. 'We are at a low ebb, a very low ebb,' he began, before rattling through Britain's present ills as he saw them: mass migration, 17 years without real-wage growth, the highest industrial energy costs in the world, unaffordable housing, an ever-spiralling national debt, a surge in benefit claimants, seven million people on NHS waiting lists, a collapsing graduate premium, the failure to deport foreign criminals, the Chagos sell-out, the back-door blasphemy laws, the court backlogs, the migrant hotels, the shoplifting, the crime.
He prefaced this taxonomy of descent with a bid to 'rebuke the doom' of 'our present malaise'; 'to make this country', as he put it in a narrative twist, 'greater still'. He attacked the political class of 'recent decades' who had 'stopped working with the grain of sentiment of the British people', dismissing public opinion as the siren call of populism 'even if that meant doing precisely the opposite to what the public wanted'. It was time, he said, to listen to them again.
He misquoted a scene in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia in which a character declares '[this] the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong'. He too, he told the room, had realised that an old order is ending: the long legacy of Blairism, unwittingly upheld by his party after 2010. A new order lay ahead. He promised a revolutionary conservatism, an echo of Thatcher in form if not in content.
One consequence of Jenrick's metamorphosis is that he has a lot of problems with a lot of things he never had any problem with before. Some who remember his earlier self find the juxtaposition jarring. Amber Rudd, the former Conservative home secretary, whom Jenrick served as a junior ministerial aide in 2017, remembers him then as 'pretty unremarkable. No sign then of this right-wing zealot!'
Between 2014 and 2022, Jenrick only mentioned immigration a handful of times during debate in the House of Commons. In 2017, when he was serving as Rudd's parliamentary private secretary, he called for a 'managed but liberal immigration policy that seeks to attract the most highly skilled people that we need', without any specific cap on their number, 'and a tone that welcomes people into this country rather than repelling them'.
He is also a late convert to the horrors of net zero, having committed as housing secretary to building 'net zero homes' and reaffirming in 2021 'our commitment to net zero and the environment'. By the time we met, Jenrick was describing net zero as 'a policy which has led to the deindustrialisation of our country, impoverishing many working people with unnecessarily high energy prices'. His focus now is not on the climate but to 'save what remains of our industrial base'.
These recent remoorings are what disturb Jenrick's critics, who see the consistency of a weathervane in his newly convenient viewpoints, catering as they do to hard Tory tastes. (Jenrick won the support of the European Research Group, the party's bluest Brexiteers and strongest social conservatives, in last year's leadership election; he promised Jacob Rees-Mogg the party chairmanship if he won.) 'He's a man for all seasons,' as one high Tory moderate puts it. It was not a compliment.
I met Jenrick again in his Commons office behind the Speaker's chair on 1 July – the day Starmer caved to his party over welfare. It was sweltering, outside and in. Jenrick had his jacket off but his shirt cuffs still affixed. He bounces towards you, smiling, when he greets you. I had asked him who he thought he was becoming politically a week earlier, and had since been briefed on his influences and interests. Charles de Gaulle came up, as he now tends to do on the right. It's a telling choice: not Churchill, who kept a nation unconquered, but De Gaulle, who gave pride to one in shame.
'I think there are parallels to the situation we find ourselves in today,' Jenrick said, casting back to De Gaulle's return to power in 1959. 'The political elite was unpopular, and there was a democratic settlement that wasn't answering fundamental problems.' In Jenrick's telling, it was De Gaulle's pride in his own country that turned France around, something Britain's recent leaders have lacked – or failed to impose. 'We seem to have had this crisis of confidence as a country whereby we don't talk about our history. Many of our institutions set themselves up in direct opposition to it, and seem to take pleasure in denigrating it.' (Jenrick has suggested that Britain's former colonies owe it a 'debt of gratitude', a comment his team stand by.)
I knew Jenrick also professed an interest in Lee Kuan Yew – the dynastic and dictatorial father of modern Singapore – who has become an even more fashionable lodestar for the right than De Gaulle, as well as for Tony Blair. Lee had been impressed by how high-trust a society London was when he visited in the late 1940s; an observation that seems to have made its way to Jenrick not through Lee's books but a viral tweet from 2023. What, the right asks, has become of the Britain that Lee observed? Honesty boxes now exist only in hamlets and villages.
'I think there's a very prevalent sense in Britain right now,' Jenrick told me, 'that the police, local councils and officialdom lack confidence, and petty rule-breaking seems to have been decriminalised. I think the country is crying out for an attitude towards crime and the public realm which is altogether different. Our kids should be able to walk through town and city centres in safety. The street should be clean. Look at what's happening in Birmingham – it's appalling.'
I had been invited to Birmingham a week earlier for a reason. It is, to Jenrick, a local emblem of Britain's national decline. Many on the left would argue that the degradation Jenrick describes has its roots in austerity and 14 years of Tory failure. Jenrick turns instead to what has become the supreme cause on the right: immigration.
Jenrick went to Birmingham earlier this year to film a video for GB News on fly-tipping. He chose to go to Handsworth, a majority Asian area with a significant black population, where around one in ten residents is white. Handsworth – which was hit by riots in 1981, 1985, 1991 and 2005, and is a half-hour drive from Shifnal – was described to me by those close to Jenrick as 'a community which is set apart, really, from the rest of the country. People there are living arguably segregated lives.'
It has become common on the right to talk in terms of ethnicity. The day before I went to see Jenrick, Neil O'Brien, a Tory MP and close ally of his, had posted about the almost three-fold rise in babies born to non-British mothers since 1997, and Matthew Goodwin, a former academic turned shock jock, had told the Spectator that Englishness was an ethnicity, separate from British identity. This is new and radical territory for Britain's political class, and would have been alien to them in the 2010s.
When I raised this debate with Jenrick, he notably agreed that there was an English ethnicity but had no interest in the question. His concern was Britain's cultural identity, not questions of race and religion, although I was unsure where one set of concerns started and the others ended. 'By 2030,' he claimed, '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 – and if that is how events play out, we're going to have to work immensely hard to integrate those people. Not many other countries have experienced that.' He brought up central Luton, home of the far-right influencer Tommy Robinson, where he said that almost 50 per cent of the population were born outside the UK. (In the 2021 census, 38.4 per cent of Luton's residents were born outside the UK.) 'That's almost without precedent.'
In one recent video, Jenrick focused on the crime rates of people from various nationalities. He began it by claiming that Afghans are 20 times more likely to be convicted of a sexual offence than a British citizen. The video went on to cite Eritreans, Somalians, Albanians and Congolese nationals as greatly over-represented in crime statistics. The statistics are hard to source; Jenrick has called for migrant crime data to be published.
'I simply want to see an honest debate about where crime is occurring in the country and who's committing it,' Jenrick said when we spoke about the video. 'I don't think it's helpful if the state, by accident or design, covers that up.'
But what are the consequences of such knowledge? In his first term, Trump banned immigration from places he deemed to be 'shithole countries'. Jenrick is not advocating that, but he suggested Britain could institute greater background checks on immigrants from certain countries. He looks to inspiration from Trump on other fronts: the withdrawal of visas from student protesters who have marched in favour of Hamas or the Iranian ayatollah. He told me he had begun to try to do this in his final weeks at the Home Office in 2023, shortly after 7 October. 'I think you've got to do that writ large,' he said.
In 2021, Jenrick had welcomed an Afghan interpreter called Ahmaddullah to his constituency of Newark. He had fled from Kabul with his family. When I brought this up, Jenrick described to me the tears he and his wife had shed after greeting them on a 'perfect summer's day'. The Jenricks had given Ahmaddullah prams and toys they no longer needed for their children. 'It was incredibly moving to us,' he told me.
He wants Britain 'to be a big-hearted country where we do welcome people who are in genuine need', but 'you can't do things like that routinely if so many people coming in are abusing the system, right?' Jenrick saw no dissonance between the statistics deployed in his video and his own experience with Ahmaddullah. Nor did he think Gazans should be resettled here on a scheme akin to the one Britain offered Ukrainians. British immigration cannot, clearly, only be a question of need. 'I don't support that scheme,' he said. 'Ukraine is a European country to which we had a high degree of geographical proximity.' Kyiv is 1,400 miles away from London. There is an unspoken logic to his position.
Jenrick speaks more temperately in person than he does online, where he has sought to hound 'activist' judges and written articles on how Britain is 'importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women', in which he describes the past 30 years of immigration as a 'disastrous experiment'. But his mild air is liable to mislead; he stands by all of his comments.
'I don't think you can skirt around some of these issues… We've left millions of people in the country feeling as if their views are being completely ignored. Why did grooming gangs happen? Part of the reason was that many people in this country felt that if they spoke up about it, they would be labelled as racist.' He thinks Louise Casey's report into the gangs has 'entirely vindicated' his position.
This is what has impressed some Cameroons above all. Jenrick has made his name by talking about an issue most politicians are too terrified to discuss. If he can speak plainly to the public about something so tense, what else, they ask, can he do next?
Jenrick was furious when Sunak declined to make him home secretary in November 2023, spurring his resignation as immigration minister three weeks later. He felt that he had been shafted: he was the one who knew the department, and knew how ineffectively it was manning the UK's border. He was the one who had visited migration centres across Britain, becoming harder, harsher, in the process, ordering children's decorations to be painted over to make the centres less welcoming.
And he was the one who had been to places like Dover, where residents described finding young men rummaging through their kitchens and lying in their beds – or were they in the garden? The stories confused, but the sense was clear: Britain was being 'overrun' as they, and he, would have it. He felt he knew how to fix that, yet the job went to James Cleverly, the then foreign secretary.
Freed once again from government – Johnson had sacked him in 2021 after abandoning Jenrick's bold attempt at planning reform – Jenrick gave up a belief that 'our politics basically worked' and he should try to 'work within it'. Much of politics, he began to realise, happened online, its central characters sustained by self-made media. A new game was there to be played: political currency among the political-media class could now be measured in view counts. He couldn't win the old game in any case. He would go direct-to-voter, and acquire the sharp definition of a conviction politician: hated or loved, but no longer ignored.
That reinvention foundered late last year when he failed to win the Tory party leadership. But instead of wilting, he kept moving forward, pressing his staff for action. 'If we haven't done something by 2 or 3pm he'll ask, 'What are we doing? We're wasting the day.'' Young, hungry Conservative staffers began to see something in Jenrick. As his digital presence grew, Badenoch's brief political standing collapsed. The Tories polled 28 per cent in the month after she became leader last November, one point behind Labour. They are now polling at about 18 per cent, four behind Labour and 11 behind Reform. Jenrick has become, whether by accident or design, a Tory leader-in-waiting. In a subsequent conversation Jenrick's team stressed the importance of Badenoch's policy commissions to ensuring the party's preparedness for government.
Anything can happen next. Most voters are no longer loyal to a party and the next election may be four years away. Keir Starmer was facing calls to resign four years ago, after the Hartlepool by-election, while Boris Johnson was dreaming of a decade in power. Jenrick knows how far away that election is, and is not dismissing Farage as past Tory leaders did. He could end up working with him.
'I admire his longevity,' Jenrick said of him when we spoke. 'But I don't think he is the person you want to have running your schools or your hospitals.' Being prime minister requires both 'a sense of vision and an interest in detailed policymaking', he said, as if in open audition for the role. 'And you've got to couple that with serious application.'
Jenrick, having seen the entrails of the British state, may have a more convincing story to tell of how to fix Britain than Farage, who has run nothing and leads a party with only a handful of MPs. Jenrick, at least, learned how not to run a country from Johnson. But Jenrick has a problem that Farage does not, one that came up in focus groups last year. Many voters felt then that he was saying the right things, but he was the wrong person to say them. He looked, to them, like a member of the metropolitan elite: like a London lawyer turned politician in a well-cut suit. Farage, who is very much part of that elite, has made a career out of appearing to exist outside of it. He has become a symbol of his politics. Jenrick appears to be a more dissonant messenger of his own views.
Jenrick bristled when I brought this up. 'I don't really get it,' he said. 'Who am I? I'm a guy who grew up in Wolverhampton to working-class parents… The reason I am in politics is to stand up for those people.'
Jenrick's critics will mock his narrative – wasn't he the man, they say, who as housing secretary approved a planning application from a media tycoon after meeting him at a dinner, sparing him a £45m charge in a decision that was later ruled unlawful? Allies of Jenrick have their own fears, that he will end up like Osborne: respected but not liked, with a sneer of cold command the public never warms to. 'He has a bumptiousness that's hard to overcome,' says one former MP, a breathlessness visible in a recent video that pounced on Rachel Reeves' tearful appearance in the Commons.
Still, the most gratuitous error would be to cast him as aberrant. To do so is to miss the point. Jenrick himself appears unsure how far to take his newfound, or newly expressed, beliefs. He tends towards old Conservative respectability in manner, but online he presents, or becomes, something much sharper-edged, more modern. He may soon find himself drawn not merely towards Farage, but beyond him. In that sense, he is perhaps a harbinger of the Tory party to come, and of the British right's radical future.
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