If you want to kill a snake in the grass, the best thing to do is cut its head off. That’s what Kemi Badenoch has done to Robert Jenrick, and it’s not before time.
I make it my business to have good relationships with politicians across the political spectrum, and it’s rare that I’m not on speaking terms with any of them. Robert Jenrick has been a rare exception to that rule
A year ago last week, I write an article in the ‘I’ newspaper in which I called out Jenrick for some outrageous comments he had made on social media about ‘alien cultures’ and ‘medieval attitudes’. He appeared to be tarring all muslims with the same brush. I remember messaging Kemi Badenoch advising her to sack him. I wrote that he was using the language of Tommy Robinson and words have consequences.
Jenrick didn’t take my words well, and we haven’t spoken since, and I haven’t interviewed him since.
I am still perplexed as to what has happened to Jenrick over the last few years. He has turned from a uber Cameroon into a foaming at the mouth anti immigrant hard right winger.
Never trust a turncoat is a wise maxim to adopt in politics. I don’t think Kemi Badenoch has ever trusted Jenrick. He made a tactical mistake in accepting a job, which is by no means one of the senior jobs in the Shadow Cabinet. He clearly felt that if he rejected it, party members wouldn’t like it. He decided to bide his time and wait for Kemi’s leadership to self-implode. And by the summer, he probably felt that strategy was working and about to deliver the leadership to him on a plate. One more heave. Kemi knew exactly what was going on but continued to think it was better to have him in the tend pissing out, rather than outside the tend pissing in.
Since then, she has come into her own, and with every passing month, Jenrick could see any prospect of being able to challenge her, slipping through his fingers.
And here we are today. At the time of writing, all we know is that Kemi’s team has what they describe as ‘irrefutable’ evidence that he was planning to defect. They apparently got hold of a draft of his defection speech.
So what were Team Kemi’s options? Try to persuade him out of it or take the bull by the horns and get ahead of it. To choose the latter path was undoubtedly the right one. Get on the front foot and take the fight to him. Wrongfoot him and make him look like the traitorous, careerist tosser that he’s always been.
The smack of firm leadership is rarely the wrong path to take. Starmer did something similar when he consigned Jeremy Corbyn to the political wilderness.
The risk now is that a whole host of Jenrick’s erstwhile supporters might follow him, although I think they may well wait to see which way the wind is blowing. John Hayes and Richard Holden are two names people will speculate about, but I think it is highly unlikely they would leave. John Hayes likes to see himself as a powerbroker in the Conservative party, and Jenrick’s defection won’t affect that.
Farage has a press conference later this afternoon in which he has a choice to make. Does he warmly embrace Jenrick, who he has in the past called a ‘fraud’ or might he see this as an opportunity to say, no, we don’t accept just any old Tory and no, Mr Jenrick, you’re on your own.
In many ways that would be utterly hilarious and leave Jenrick out in the political wilderness, all dressed up and no place to go. If it weren’t so pathetic, it would be hilarious.