Robert Jenrick diagnosed Tory party’s ails, but can he follow through on recovery?

Good morning. The parliamentary recess is drawing to a close, and so too is our series in which I explore the case for and against each of the Conservative leadership candidates (check out Mel Stride, Priti Patel, Tom Tugendhat and James Cleverly here). We are going in reverse bookmakers’ order: which brings us to Robert Jenrick.

In favour

What do opposition parties need to do to return to government? Be honest about their failings in office, repent those mistakes, have a clear diagnosis of where the country is going wrong.

Those aren’t quite the words I would choose but they are a pretty good summary of the task. And the best case for Robert Jenrick is that a) they are his words and b) he has been pretty clear about what he thinks the Conservative party’s failings were.

Many of his rivals sound like they want to go to the country in 2028 telling them they made the wrong choice in 2024, that things were going brilliantly and that now they’ve had some time to think it through, wouldn’t it be a really good idea to come back to the Tory party? This message is one that defeated parties love to send when they first lose office and it essentially never works.

As Jenrick has, again, himself said, simply talking about “uniting” the party won’t cut it. Yes, divided parties don’t win elections, but defeated parties do also have to go through the necessary arguments over their direction in order to become fit for office again.

Added to that, Jenrick is a rare Conservative politician who ticks both the following boxes: he did not back Liz Truss’s 2022 leadership bid nor was he still in the bunker with Rishi Sunak when he led the party to a crushing defeat two years later.

The premierships of Truss and Sunak were not good for the Conservative party. As Jenrick said to the Sunday Times:

We lost votes to Lib Dems and Labour because they lost trust in our ability to manage the economy. In 12 hours, Liz Truss’s mini-budget undid our reputation for fiscal responsibility established over 12 hard-fought years. I agree with the vital importance of delivering more economic growth and for taxes to fall over time. But the cavalier, careless and frankly cack-handed way in which those values were advanced in the mini-budget was profoundly unconservative.

Then the party followed that with two years of failure, drift, and deeply damaging failed gimmicks to try and turn around the party’s fate.

The former immigration minister quit Sunak’s government last December, claiming in his resignation letter that he refuses to be “yet another politician who makes promises on immigration to the British public but does not keep them”. Whether you take Jenrick’s own rationale for his resignation at face value or you believe that he really quit because he had not been given a proper cabinet role and he saw an opportunity to steal a march on his rivals in the leadership contest, the fact remains that because he resigned, he can also walk away from the reputational damage of being part of that government more easily.

And in a way, it really doesn’t matter how cynical you are about Jenrick’s motivations: by resigning he was able to essentially kill and eat Suella Braverman’s leadership campaign. It meant that MPs on the right of the party who had once dismissed him started to pay attention to him, it gave him time to build allies, it meant that he started attending the various meetings of Tory rebels and so on. He was able to use that opportunity to woo Braverman’s former backers, and with it get on the ballot for the leadership contest.

Yes, no one thinks that the Conservative party can revive after a single term, but I am old enough to remember when people said that about Keir Starmer. Being a successful party leader involves a degree of low cunning and an ability to seize your moment.

Against

The Conservative party has 121 MPs, several of whom are frankly unfit to hold frontbench roles, several of whom won’t want to, and several will be select committee chairs.

The job of holding together a politically diverse opposition frontbench — when in practice the next leader will not be able to do much more than move the available pieces around the board, cajoling and winning people over — requires goodwill among Conservative MPs and a record of successfully wooing them.

One reason why Robert Jenrick was sacked by Boris Johnson — in addition to the scandal he became embroiled in — is that essentially his approach to Conservative MPs who opposed his attempts to reform planning was to call them Nimbys. He was right, but in the end his reforms didn’t outlast him and it doesn’t exactly bode well for his ability to usher a fractious and shattered Conservative party back to power.

In addition, the circumstances of his sacking are an asset to his external opponents. Understanding the scale of the task and being able to do one important half of it (detaching himself from the record of Truss and Sunak) is not much good if he can’t corral his MPs or escape the shadow of his own career.

Now try this

As I may have written — once or twice — I think that Radio 3’s evening line-up (which I listen to while writing this newsletter when the politicians have mostly gone to bed and the day’s news is over) is the strongest it has been in a very, very long time. From Night Tracks through to Round Midnight through to, if I am running late, Through the Night it is a really brilliant set of programmes these days. (The less said about the mid-morning programme and the dreadful “Playlister”, the better: the one advantage is it means that I go and find something else to listen to that is more modern over on 6 Music or commercial radio.)

Anyway, a recent discovery, thanks to Night Tracks, is this wonderful piece of classical music by Bryce Dessner: “Haven”, part of his 2019 record El Chan, which you can listen to here on Apple Music and here on Spotify. Several of you have asked for an Apple Music playlist in addition to the Spotify one, which I will get on and do the next time I’m on a long train journey.

Top stories today

• Starmer’s approval rating slides | More than half of Britons disapprove of the new Labour government, polling showed yesterday, as a separate survey revealed many more voters expect to be hit with higher personal taxes than before the general election in July.

• No Rosebank without a thorn | The government will not challenge a court bid by environmental groups to block the development of the Rosebank oilfield in the North Sea, potentially putting the future of the project by Norway’s Equinor and Ithaca into doubt.

• New ‘support’ deals to boost migrant returns | The UK is seeking to accelerate returns of migrants to 11 countries including Iraq, Ethiopia and Vietnam. The government has posted a contract opportunity worth £15mn over three years for a commercial partner to support the “reintegration” of people returning from Britain to their home countries.

• Flighty framing | Keir Starmer has said he wants to boost educational and cultural “exchanges” between the UK and EU. The prime minister said “we do not have plans” for a youth mobility scheme with the bloc, but did not explicitly rule out negotiating one in future.

• ‘Deal with him’ | The UK government’s new transport minister got a railway engineer sacked for raising safety concerns about overcrowding at one of Britain’s busiest stations, Politico’s Jon Stone reports. Here is the Independent’s deep dive from April into the Euston safety concerns.