Robert Jenrick: The Tory big-hitter ejected from party he wanted to lead

Robert Jenrick insisted just last month that he wasn’t “going anywhere”, amid the latest bout of rumours that he could one day join Reform UK.

But the former minister is now looking for a new political home, after Kemi Badenoch dramatically sacked him from her shadow cabinet and the Conservative Party.

She said she had seen “irrefutable evidence” that her shadow justice secretary was planning to defect from the Conservatives.

Jenrick is yet to respond to that claim. But the latest developments are the culmination of months of speculation about the 44-year-old’s future, as the Tories continue to trail Nigel Farage’s party in the polls under Badenoch’s leadership.

Jenrick lost out on the Tory crown to Badenoch in the 2024 leadership contest, a defeat he did not take well, according to former Tory colleagues.

He has been in campaigning mode ever since, accepting the position of shadow justice secretary but often straying beyond that brief in interviews and speeches.

He continued to shift ever further to the right on immigration as he sought to outflank Reform and grab attention on social media.

It has been a dramatic transformation for the Remain-voting Newark MP, once dubbed “Robert Generic” by his Tory critics for his supposedly middle-of-the-road political views.

As a leadership candidate, he argued for the party to back an exit from Europe’s main human rights treaty to tackle illegal migration – a position initially rejected by Badenoch, that she has since embraced.

As Badenoch’s shadow justice secretary, he launched broadsides against “activist” judges, and became increasingly critical of court rulings in immigration cases.

He also built up a considerable profile online, attracting attention with eye-catching videos in which he confronted fare evaders on the London Underground and filmed fly-tipped waste in Labour-run Birmingham.

And he hit the headlines after it emerged he had described the city’s Handsworth district as “one of the worst-integrated places” he had ever visited.

Born in Wolverhampton in 1982, Jenrick grew up in Shropshire and Herefordshire, and went to a private school. His father was a gas fitter and his mother worked as a secretary.

He gained a first-class degree in history at Cambridge University and wrote for a student newspaper.

After working as a corporate lawyer in London and Moscow, he moved into business, becoming an international managing director at auction house Christie’s.

But politics beckoned. In the 2010 general election, he stood unsuccessfully as the Conservative candidate for Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire.

He made it into Parliament in 2014, in a by-election in Newark, prompted by a cash-for-questions scandal. He saw off a challenge from Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party, then riding high in the opinion polls.

He has represented the Nottinghamshire seat ever since, embracing an identity as a Midlands Man with an “unashamedly provincial” political outlook.

“I think normal people like in Newark have been very badly served by the political class the whole of my adult life,” he recently told the Financial Times.

He is married to Michal Berkner, an Israeli-born and US-educated corporate lawyer. They have three daughters who they are bringing up as Jewish.

At the 2024 Conservative conference, Jenrick revealed he had given one of them the middle name Thatcher, in tribute to the late former PM.

He has been a strong supporter of Israel’s war against Hamas and Hezbollah, and has called for the UK to move its embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

In 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Jenrick household took in a Ukrainian refugee family, becoming the first MP’s family to do so.

More recently, Jenrick admitted using weight loss jab Ozempic for around six weeks, but said he “didn’t particularly enjoy it” and went on to lose weight “in the normal way” by eating healthier food and exercising more.

“To be honest, I was overweight,” he told the Politico website, adding he had lost four stone in 12 months.

Among his first jobs in Westminster, Jenrick was a parliamentary aide to a number of cabinet ministers including Michael Gove, Liz Truss and Amber Rudd, before spending 18 months as a junior Treasury minister under Chancellor Philip Hammond.

Like Truss – another figure now on the Tory right – he voted to remain in the European Union in 2016. But he has since described Brexit as the last government’s greatest achievement.

In 2019, as housing, communities and local government secretary, he got into hot water over a controversial planning decision.

He faced questions about a decision to overrule the blocking of a £1bn building project in the Isle of Dogs, east London, proposed by publisher and Tory donor Richard Desmond – two weeks before Desmond made a further donation.

It transpired the two men had sat together during a party fundraising dinner two months earlier. Jenrick insisted he did not act improperly, but his decision was later overturned.

Separately, while a Covid lockdown was in place, it emerged he had driven 150 miles from London to his Herefordshire home, and then another 40 miles to deliver food and medicine, he said, to his isolating parents.

Downing Street publicly backed him and continued to use him as one of their most effective media firefighters when political difficulties mounted.

But in September 2021, he was sacked by Boris Johnson as part of a wider cabinet reshuffle.

He returned to government a year later as a health minister under Truss – one of the prime minister’s rare appointments of a Sunak backer. And when Sunak entered No 10, he took on the immigration brief and attended cabinet.

Many believed that the Tory moderate had been sent to the Home Office to, in effect, “man mark” Suella Braverman, the much more hardline home secretary. The pair were widely expected to fall out.

In fact, Braverman and Jenrick were Cambridge University contemporaries who attended each other’s weddings.

In any case, their relationship was helped by a clear shift in Jenrick’s approach while he was in the role. This is something he acknowledges, saying his views were hardened by what he learnt about the immigration system in the Home Office.

Earlier, as communities secretary when working closely with the Home Office on immigration and extremism, he is understood to have become frustrated that the Home Office was seen as the “bad cop” on these issues while his own department was seen as the “good cop” and he resolved to tackle that.

In December 2023, he resigned from Sunak’s cabinet, saying the prime minister’s emergency Rwanda legislation did not go far enough and would not work.

Ever since, he became an outspoken critic of what he said was his party’s failure to deliver on its promises to cut immigration.

Badenoch has publicly taken a relaxed attitude to Jenrick’s excursions from his brief, including his for the Tories to be less hostile to Reform.

She also defended him over accusations of racism when the Handsworth row erupted.

But it was evident from the video she posted announcing Jenrick’s expulsion from the party that her patience has finally run out.

And the ambitious former minister – who remains an MP – may now be looking to make a fresh start with Reform.