THE BIG READ: There's a new contender for the Tory leadership who might just be timing his run to perfection

Over the last three months, one former Cabinet minister has performed at a level way above all the others - and the Tory grassroots are starting to sit up and take notice

WHEN you have a surname that lends itself to a disobliging pun, politics can be a cruel environment.

Photo by Noah Silliman on Unsplash

For example, George Eustice was one of the more sensible and knowledgeable environment secretaries of recent times and yet was naturally nicknamed “George Useless” by detractors. Scotland’s First Minister has obviously already attracted the soubriquet Humza Useless for similar reasons: because in politics a pun is like a mountain, to be climbed upon on just because it is there (I’m not saying he’s any good, by the way!). All of which brings me on to the subject of Robert Jenrick.

When he appeared on the scene at the Newark by-election of 2014, I was campaigning for Ukip candidate Roger Helmer. Jenrick appeared to me to be one of those standard-issue, very highly educated young politicians with conventional centrist views who prospered in the Tory party when David Cameron led it.

He seemed to rise without trace through ministerial ranks, making the Cabinet when Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019. It was around this time that Westminster wags began referring to him as “Robert Generic” on account of him allegedly never knowingly stating an original or interesting opinion.

Well, he’s not generic any longer, is he? Since resigning as immigration minister in December, Jenrick’s star has been in the ascendant. Noticing that he had lost a bit of weight and got himself a new tough-guy crew cut hairstyle, the GB News presenter Camilla Tominey mischievously asked him on air in January if he planned to stand for the Tory leadership when it next became available. No denial ensued.

Back then the idea of Jenrick as the next Conservative leader appeared far-fetched even to those former Government insiders working full time to oust Rishi Sunak. “That’s not going to happen,” one of them told me. When I checked in with the same source a fortnight or so ago, he had changed his tune: “He’s done very well and is now a contender.”

The bookies odds back this up, with Jenrick now quoted at 12-1 fourth favourite, rather than being the rank outsider he was when he resigned as Immigration Minister before Christmas. The main factor that has propelled him upwards is the exceptionally clearly argued new policy agenda that he is seeking to persuade colleagues to adopt.

His latest offering is a plan to raise UK defence spending to three per cent of GDP, primarily by reassigning fully half of the bloated foreign aid budget to strengthening military manpower and weaponry. He has also just set out a plan to force UK governments to publish nationality data on the perpetrators of crime, arguing that we cannot create an immigration policy to serve our country if we do not fully understand all the trade-offs involved.

Some may find Jenrick’s carefully calibrated analyses somewhat bloodless, compared say to the more colourful turns of phrase deployed by Suella Braverman. But equally it could be argued that his approach offers right-wing figures far more protection from being shot down or demonised by media and political opponents.

For instance, in his last appearance on the Radio Four Today programme, he billed his radical plan for recording criminal nationality as part of a “risk-based” strategy, adding: “What I am proposing is that data on crime plays a part in that. We would want to apply a higher level of scrutiny to nationalities that are higher risk.” Pretty hard to mount a reasoned disagreement with, still less to condemn, I would have thought.

As part of an apparently inexhaustible stream of robust Conservative opinions, he has now turned his fire on the Government’s ridiculous early release of offenders programme, correctly arguing that lack of prison capacity rather than the state’s duty of protect the public is driving penal policy.

He has also spoken fluently and well in the Commons on a number of recent occasions, notably over the flaws in Sunak’s half-strength and doomed-to-failure Safety of Rwanda Bill and the scandal of the Speaker changing parliamentary procedures as a result of the intimidation of MPs by Islamists.

So what has brought about this abandonment of the generic platitudes of the failed paradigm and the advancement of new arguments reflecting traditional Conservative principles and the politics of national belonging?