Robert Jenrick profile: Who is the Tory leadership candidate that went from centrist Remainer to Trump-backing voice of the right

Three years after becoming an MP in a by-election, Robert Jenrick attended Donald Trump’s inauguration as US president in 2017. He insisted his presence was not an endorsement.

If he becomes Tory leader on Saturday, and if three days later Mr Trump wins a return to the White House, Mr Jenrick could face an awkward decision about whether it would be wise to go back to Washington in January.

On the other hand, if Kemi Badenoch wins the Tory crown, a defeated Mr Jenrick will have time on his hands for globe-trotting and glad-handing in foreign capitals with world leaders, however controversial.

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But Mr Jenrick is no stranger to controversy. He’s been a controversial figure throughout his decade in parliament: a decade in which – as he points out- he has served in government under five Conservative prime ministers.

That’s certainly true, but it’s a truth that’s a comment on the turbulent state of the Tory party over the past 10 years as much as anything else.

While his leadership opponent Ms Badenoch’s journey has brought her more than 3,000 miles from West Africa to near the top of British politics, Mr Jenrick’s journey has been political, ideological even.

It’s been a remarkable transformation that has taken him from compassionate centrist Cameroon Remainer in the 2016 referendum, to anti-immigration zealot and standard-bearer of the Brexiteer hard right on the Tory benches in the Commons.

It’s earned him the rather unkind nickname “Robert Generic” among Conservative MPs. But he says he’s been called worse things.

“My values haven’t changed one bit,” he claimed in an interview with Sophy Ridge on Sky News this week. “But yes, it’s absolutely the case that as a result of the experiences I’ve had as a minister, for example, at the Home Office, and the thought that I’ve given in recent months and years to how we tackle the challenges that we’re facing as a country, that I’ve come up with what I think are the right solutions.”

His leadership campaign has seen him take an uncompromising hardline stance on immigration, almost to the exclusion of other issues. It’s a strategy he hopes will win him votes from the party’s largely right-wing members.

His core policy is quitting the European Convention of Human Rights – while this delights the hardcore Euro-sceptic MPs who are backing him, it could split the party if he wins next month.

Indeed, the leading backers in his campaign are the hard men of the Tory right, including veteran Brexiteers Mark Francois and Sir John Hayes, who was previously Suella Braverman’s “brain” and leading tactician.

For Mr Jenrick, it’s been a big shift from the days when with Rishi Sunak and Oliver Dowden he was one of Tories’ “Three Musketeers”, seen as a trio of centrist rising stars.

Path to parliament

But Mr Jenrick has not just been on a journey from Remain to Brexit and from centrist to the Tory right. He’s also spoken about how his upbringing in Wolverhampton shaped his values. He’s described his father as a “white van man” who started his own business.

He told party activists, in a “fireside chat” Q&A at the Tory conference in Birmingham, that he grew up in a “working-class background”.

His grandmother paid for him to go to fee-paying Wolverhampton Grammar School, he said. From there it was Cambridge University, where he read history, then political science at the University of Pennsylvania, before qualifying as a solicitor and then a job at Christie’s, the art auctioneers.

It was while working as a solicitor that he met his American wife, Michal Berkner, a high-flying corporate lawyer who is eight years older than Mr Jenrick. Like his rival Ms Badenoch, the Jenricks have three children.

Throughout Mr Jenrick’s leadership campaign, his extrovert wife has been his chief cheerleader, highly visible in the front row of the audience at most events.

His wife is Jewish and Mr Jenrick, who describes himself as “the father of a Jewish family”, has been a strong pro-Israel voice, including wearing a “Hamas are terrorists”, hoodie during the campaign.

Many Tory MPs believe his wife is the driving force behind his ambition. Anecdotally, it’s even been claimed that she orders for him at dinner.

Mr Jenrick fought Newcastle-under-Lyme for the Tories in 2010 and was only 1,500 votes behind Labour’s Paul Farrelly, before winning Newark in a by-election caused by former Conservative MP Patrick Mercer being exposed in a lobbying scandal in 2014.

On the day Mr Mercer announced his resignation, Nigel Farage said he was tempted to stand as a candidate for his United Kingdom Independence Party, but though that did not happen UKIP came second in the by-election.

Earlier this year, in an interview with Sky News political editor Beth Rigby, Mr Jenrick said he would have “no problem” with Mr Farage being a member of the Conservative Party.

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Once in parliament, for three years from 2015 to 2018 under David Cameron and then Theresa May, Mr Jenrick was a parliamentary private secretary to four high-profile ministers, Esther McVey, Michael Gove, Liz Truss and Amber Rudd.

Government, controversy, sacking

Then he got his first ministerial job, a junior minister at the Treasury, before his big break when Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019 and his career really took off, with promotion to the cabinet as housing and local government secretary.

But that was when Mr Jenrick started to become a highly controversial figure. Two major controversies stand out: a planning row involving the Tory donor, property developer and publisher Richard Desmond and allegations that he broke lockdown rules during the COVID pandemic.

First, he survived a huge row over his decision to fast-track planning permission for a £1bn property scheme in east London two weeks before Mr Desmond donated £12,000 to the Conservative party.

The pair had sat next to each other at a fund-raising dinner, at which Mr Desmond showed the minister a video of the development on his mobile phone.

It was hugely controversial because Mr Jenrick’s decision, later overturned, saved the Express Newspapers tycoon £45m in a local tax on property developments in the borough of Tower Hamlets.

But weeks later Mr Jenrick was in trouble again. During COVID lockdowns, it was revealed he travelled to his parents’ home in Shropshire and to his family home, a 17th century manor house in Herefordshire, more than 150 miles from London and 130 miles from his Newark constituency.

Although Mr Jenrick said he was delivering food and medicine to his elderly parents and did not enter their house, his visit came after he appealed to people not to visit their family on Mother’s Day.

“The advice today is very clear, we need to stay at home for all bar the most essential activities, and by doing that we’ll protect the NHS and help to save lives,” he told Sky News at the time.

He survived the furore again, but was later sacked by Mr Johnson in a September 2021 reshuffle in which his job went to Michael Gove. But he returned to government under Liz Truss, as a health minister, and then Mr Sunak appointed him immigration minister under Home Secretary Suella Braverman. It’s been claimed he was not happy – and cried.

Leadership ambition

As immigration minister, he faced bitter criticism after ordering staff at a Kent asylum centre for unaccompanied children to paint over murals showing cartoons from the Jungle Book and Mickey Mouse, to make it less welcoming. The cartoons were not appropriate, he said, but critics claimed his action was heartless.

“It’s not something I would do again,” he told Sophy Ridge this week. “I would never want to do anything that was anything other than compassionate towards children. I’m a dad of three young children.”

And then in December last year, Mr Jenrick abruptly resigned, claiming the government’s contentious legislation to deport illegal asylum seekers to Rwanda was not tough enough and was “fatally flawed”.

“There was a choice for me at the time,” he told Sophy Ridge. “Take a bill through parliament which I knew didn’t work and which, frankly, everyone in cabinet knew didn’t work, or leave the government and make the case in parliament, where I was honest with myself and with the public, where I set out amendments to try and improve the bill, to make it actually work, get those flights off to Rwanda. And I chose to do the latter.”

But by this time, Tory MPs were convinced Mr Jenrick already had leadership ambitions and was positioning himself for a bid. Not true, he insisted in his interview with Sophy Ridge this week.

“I only decided to stand for the leadership when I finally won my seat, which was in doubt at the general election up in North Nottinghamshire,” he claimed.

Sophy, however, was not convinced. “Oh, come on!” she exclaimed. “We’re not supposed to believe that, are we?”

There were also claims that he was furious at not being appointed to succeed Ms Braverman when she was sacked, the job going instead to James Cleverly – later a leadership rival – in the reshuffle that saw Lord Cameron’s surprise appointment as foreign secretary.

Mr Jenrick’s resignation and his obvious manoeuvring ahead of a leadership bid coincided with a new trendy “Caesar” haircut and a dramatic weight loss of four stone, which he later admitted was partly due to taking the slimming drug Ozempic for six weeks.

In the early rounds of voting by Tory MPs in September, Mr Jenrick surged into the lead and was the candidate with momentum, only for Mr Cleverly to seize the momentum with a bravura performance at the Tory conference. Now, in the final stage of the contest, the momentum appears to be with Ms Badenoch.

Mr Jenrick, though, wooed the Tory activists in Birmingham with the disclosure that the middle name of his second daughter, Sophia, is Thatcher, because she was born the year Mrs Thatcher died. Not surprisingly, the activists thoroughly approved.

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His values may still be the same as when he entered parliament a decade ago, but his views and his policies have changed. He’s shifted dramatically from the Tory mainstream to the party’s right flank.

And as for Mr Trump and attending his inauguration in January if he’s re-elected president, Mr Jenrick has said during the leadership campaign: “If I were an American citizen, I would be voting for Donald Trump.”