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New Statesman
09-07-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Inside Robert Jenrick's New Right revolution
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'. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 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. Related
Daily Mail
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
As David Beckham turns 50 next week, will he get his dream birthday gifts - a united family and a knighthood?
It was little over a year ago that David Beckham proudly posed for a photographer from this newspaper with his three sons, Brooklyn, Romeo and Cruz, at his wife's 50th birthday party, all four men looking relaxed and happy. Yet just minutes before, emotions had been rather higher among the Beckhams. For as David and his family had entered smart Mayfair restaurant Oswald's, with Victoria still on crutches after breaking her foot, waiting freelance paparazzi had caused a chaotic scene. So much so that the normally publicity-friendly clan refused to stop outside for their pictures to be taken. Romeo, I'm told, was particularly angry. Not David, though. With notable grace, he beamed happily for our cameras stationed officially inside the venue, giving Mail readers an exclusive peek. Fast forward 12 months and David's diplomacy skills will be required again but this time on two fronts – domestic and professional. Because on Friday it is his own 50th birthday. And there are two things he would desperately love to happen. First the personal: he desires nothing more than for his first-born Brooklyn and his wife Nicola to join the rest of the family on an idyllic jaunt to celebrate his birthday in a secret European location. More on the delicate negotiations required for this later. As for the professional, there is one accolade that still eludes one of England's best-known figures. And that is, of course, his knighthood. Anyone who knows David would agree that this would be the perfect present. Famously patriotic – who can forget him queuing for hours to see the late Queen lying in state? – to receive his 'K' in the year he turned 50 would be thrilling for this proud Englishman. And it is thanks to David's considerable diplomatic skills that his coveted knighthood is probably more likely to happen now than ever before. His quest to become a 'Sir' has been a long, and at times turbulent, road for David. He was turned down in 2013 after issues over his tax arrangements. Four years later, in 2017, any remaining chance of achieving his dream was seemingly left in tatters after leaked emails revealed he had taken aim at the honours committee who had taken him off the list. David, usually charming and mild-mannered, called government mandarins 'unappreciative c***s' and insisted he didn't 'care about being knighted'. Now resolved, David is in the clear to be reconsidered. David appears to have spent the intervening years exerting all his charm and finesse to win over the public – not to mention the bigwigs who control these decisions behind the scenes. Now, there is a very high chance of him being handed his knighthood this year, either in the King's Birthday Honours in June or in the New Year Honours announced in December. One associate said: 'Wouldn't it be wonderful if it happened this year as David turns 50? How perfect would that be.' Indeed, David has ticked every box to help his bid – including forging a friendship with King Charles after they bonded over their love of making honey when they met at a British fashion awards ceremony in 2023. Later, he was made an ambassador for The King's Foundation and was invited to Highgrove. His Majesty, quite the charmer himself, was apparently bowled over by David. Sources tell me the King is particularly enthralled by David, keen as he is to honour and acknowledge more people from working-class backgrounds. One friend of the star tells me: 'A strong bond has been forged between them. When David handed over the honey [at the awards], the King looked surprised – perhaps he didn't expect a footballer from east London to be into beekeeping.' Other public gestures have also aided his cause. Take David's decision to forego any birthday presents and instead ask friends and loved ones to join him in donating to a new initiative in collaboration with UNICEF, for whom he has long been a Goodwill Ambassador, to help disadvantaged children – particularly girls. And when ex-England manager Gareth Southgate received his knighthood earlier this year, David was impeccably and vocally magnanimous in his congratulations. He was, say sources, 'very happy to wait and see if he gets his turn'. 'David is thrilled for him,' said a friend at the time. 'David knew it wouldn't be his time and he is fine with that but you never know what is down the line.' I've witnessed David's astonishing interpersonal skills up close myself. In 2021 I revealed he had signed a hugely lucrative deal to become an ambassador for Qatar and its 2022 World Cup. The partnership was heavily criticised as he was dealing with a country where homosexuality is illegal, and punishable by imprisonment, flogging or even death. Amnesty lambasted him, gay magazine Attitude took him to task and even holier-than-thou Gary Lineker swiped. All in all, I've since heard I caused David and his team 'a lot of grief'. A year earlier I told how Victoria had planned to use the Government's furlough scheme during the pandemic. Despite all this, David invited me to the premiere of his Netflix documentary Beckham in 2023. I was terrified he would be cross with me, but instead he walked straight over, with a beaming smile, and gave me a huge hug. It was, he said, wonderful to finally meet me and agreed to having a selfie taken together. David, ever considerate, even suggested we move away from the light behind us to get a better shot, and he snapped away. I'm not easily won over – but I was knocked out by his charm. And he smelled amazing, by the way. What then for David's chances at soothing the troubled waters at home? As I revealed last week, Brooklyn has told his parents he will be at his father's birthday, and they are said to be 'expecting' Nicola. However, on Wednesday the couple seemingly took another pop at David and Victoria. The pair shared a photograph of Easter baskets brimming with chocolate and gifts from Nicola's billionaire parents, Nelson and Claudia Peltz, on Instagram. There was no mention of Brooklyn's parents or his siblings. This all follows claims of a fall out between the influencer and his younger brother Romeo, who are said to be at loggerheads over the latter's new girlfriend, model Kim Turnbull who used to date Brooklyn's close friend Rocco Ritchie – Madonna and Guy Ritchie's son. Brooklyn and his wife didn't attend David's first birthday bash at Miami restaurant Cipriani last month, while his three siblings were present. And neither publicly wished Victoria a happy 51st birthday earlier this month, while David, Romeo and Cruz posted gushing messages. Then, in what some are interpreting as a cheeky swipe back, at a birthday party in Miami Victoria wore the same £1,600 white outfit she had designed and gifted to her daughter-in-law 14 months earlier. Beckham's team have described the rift as 'silly' – but notably haven't denied there are issues. One can only hope that the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree, and that Brooklyn may be able to imitate his father's diplomacy – and, with his wife, let bygones be bygones in time to toast David on this most special of days.
The Guardian
29-01-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Two Tory donors pay £25,000 to attend Reform fundraising dinner
Two major Conservative donors, Bassim Haidar and Mohamed Amersi, paid £25,000 each to attend a Reform fundraising dinner on Tuesday night, and sources say the party brought in pledges of more than £1m beforehand from businesspeople. Reform sources said ticket prices ranged from £10,000 for the dinner to £25,000 for a seat at the top table with Nigel Farage at Oswald's in Mayfair, central London. Haidar, an IT billionaire and Lebanese-Irish national, gave the Conservatives more than £700,000 in the run-up to the last election and is one of a string of Tory backers who have flirted with Reform as it grows in the polls. He has previously spoken about his unhappiness with changes to government policy on non-doms. Haidar told the Guardian: 'The event was a valuable opportunity to learn more about the party's mission, and I believe they have a good one to 'make the UK great again'. It's worth considering them as a strong alternative.' Amersi, who gave almost £500,000 to the Tories between 2019 and 2021, lost a high-profile legal battle with the former Conservative MP Charlotte Leslie in 2023, and the Tory MP David Davis subsequently made a string of serious allegations against him under parliamentary privilege. Amersi has also spoken of potentially donating to Labour politicians. Amersi told the Guardian: 'The energy in the room was just really electric. It does feel like momentum is behind Reform and the question is what happens to the strands of conservatism, Reform and the Conservative party. People like me, who straddle both, will certainly be pushing for a unified stance … 'Mr Farage was impressive as ever and I was particularly impressed by the young chairman, Zia Yusuf, who was dynamic and articulate. Nick Candy of course is also an amazing figure to have there. He is a doer.' Topics discussed included Reform's chances in the local elections and in Wales and Scotland. Donors who attended say they were told that 190,000 people had signed up to be Reform UK members. The fundraising event was organised by Farage and Candy, the party's new treasurer, who is also a former Conservative donor. Candy's wife, the former actor and pop star Holly Valance, was at the event. Other guests included the Duke of Marlborough, Charles James Spencer-Churchill, the socialite Lady Victoria Hervey, the boxer Derek Chisora and Ant Middleton, the former host of SAS: Who Dares Wins. Arron Banks, a longstanding ally of Farage, was also at the gathering and told reporters that Farage was 'definitely' the right man to be leading Reform, despite Elon Musk's claim that he should be replaced. Yusuf, who founded the concierge firm Velocity Black, was present alongside the Reform MPs Richard Tice, Lee Anderson and James McMurdock and the businessman George Cottrell, who often accompanies Farage despite having no official role in the party. Cottrell's mother, Fiona Cottrell, has donated £500,000. A former head of fundraising for Ukip, Cottrell spent eight months in an American jail in 2016-17 after pleading guilty to wire fraud. The Mayfair club where the event was held is owned by Robin Birley, a former Ukip and Tory donor whose half-brother is the Conservative peer and former cabinet minister Zac Goldsmith. Reform UK donors said they felt that there was 'buzz' around the party among the business community. Charlie Mullins, who gave £20,000 to Reform last year and was unable to make the event, said: 'People are coming to Reform because they see it as a party that is business-orientated at a time when the government is very anti-business.' Mullins said he was prepared to give more to the party and that he was impressed by what he had seen so far. He has given more than £89,000 to the Tories, Labour and Liberal Democrats through the firm he founded, Pimlico Plumbers. 'We're looking towards the local elections now but after that there is clearly a long-term plan looking at the next general election with Reform,' he said. 'I can tell that quite a few people I've met at Conservative functions in the past are coming on board.'
New York Times
28-01-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Reform U.K. is Said to Land Over $1 Million in Populist Show of Force
Britain's populist party, Reform U.K., was expected to bring in more than $1.25 million dollars at a glitzy fund-raiser on Tuesday, a party official said, an extraordinary amount for a party that six months ago was on the fringe of national politics. The big-ticket, American-style event was the first major fund-raiser since Nigel Farage took over as party leader and his ideological ally, Donald J. Trump, returned to the White House. Mr. Farage wants to remake British conservatism, just as Mr. Trump has in the United States. He has pushed the movement to the right with a nationalistic platform that is anti-immigrant and anti-regulation. For a party that raised less than $200,000 in all of 2023, the turnaround since Mr. Farage became its leader last year has been remarkable. Riding a populist wave that has been felt from Germany to France to Washington, Mr. Farage has catapulted his party from a political sideshow to a well-funded force. Mr. Farage arrived at Oswald's, an exclusive members-only club in London's Mayfair neighborhood Tuesday and hurried out of the drizzle, past a scrum of journalists. Oswald's is owned by Robin Birley, a major Reform donor. The Duke of Marlborough, Charles James Spencer-Churchill, followed shortly behind. Arron Banks, who bankrolled the Brexit campaign, also attended, as did Lady Victoria Hervey and Holly Valance, the former pop star and actor who is married to Reform's treasurer. A senior party official said that Reform sold 90 tickets at between £10,000 and £25,000 apiece. That would raise well over £1 million ($1.25 million) for the party. The party official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss preliminary accounting. Reform's treasurer, the real estate billionaire Nick Candy, has pledged to 'secure more money for the party than any other in British political history' and Mr. Farage has openly toyed with accepting donations from Mr. Trump's donors. The billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk has discussed donating money, Mr. Farage has said. Unlike in the United States, there are no limits on political donations in Britain. (Political spending, however, is capped.) As rumors of a looming donation from Mr. Musk, some British politicians have raised the idea of capping foreign campaign donations. Reform won a record five seats in Parliament (Mr. Farage's first win after seven failed attempts) and 14 percent of the vote in last year's national election. Today, the party is polling ahead of the Conservatives and closing the gap with the governing Labour Party. Despite the polling gains and sudden influx of cash, Reform has a steep fund-raising hill to climb. Labour raised around £30 million and the Tories about £48 million in 2023, the last full year for which data is available. Mr. Farage built his political career around opposition to the European Union and immigration, helping to drive the Brexit vote in 2016. While polls show the majority of Britons now believe that leaving the European Union was a mistake, that sentiment has not harmed Mr. Farage's status. His fortunes look set to be galvanized by Mr. Trump's win. Reform claims to be Britain's fastest growing party, recently surpassing the Conservatives with almost 187,000 supporters paying voluntary membership fees. Mr. Trump and Mr. Farage have been longtime allies. Mr. Trump heralded Mr. Farage's election last summer, and Mr. Farage was by his side at Mar-a-Lago on election night as Mr. Trump was voted back into the White House. Many of Reform's new key pledges in its 2024 manifesto, or policy platform, echo Mr. Trump's actions during his first days back in office. Reform pledged to abandon key climate targets and swing the energy sector back toward oil and gas. The party wants to to cut taxes, slash 'wasteful' government spending and increase military spending. And it wants to scrap diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Farage rallies against 'woke' ideology and 'transgender indoctrination.' One of Reform's most ambitious promises is to eliminate the National Health Service waiting lists in two years by investing in private health care and injecting £17 billion ($21.1 billion) into the public health service — nearly three times more than any other political party has pledged. But the Institute for Fiscal Studies, an independent research group, said that Reform's overall tax and spending plans 'do not add up' and will cost billions more than claimed. Last week, Mr. Farage heralded Mr. Trump's return to power as 'the greatest comeback in modern politics' and 'joyful to behold.' The Republicans, he wrote in a column for The Telegraph, have 'discovered a completely new definition of conservatism.' 'Populism was the winner in the recent elections in America,' he wrote. 'Who's to say it could not be the same in the U.K., too?'
