This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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“Rob resigned,” one of his former ministerial colleagues was keen to emphasise to me. “Most of us don’t. No one really wants to give up the private office and all the ego-enhancing rest of it. He did. It doesn’t matter how much calculation went into it, that was courage.” Such was the making of Rob Jenrick as a contender, but it didn’t in the end make him Tory leader. I’ve talked to members of his campaign team inside and outside parliament to see why those on the right of the party failed this time.

On entering the House of Commons in a 2013 by-election, Jenrick showed no signs of dissent from leadership orthodoxy. A loyal Cameroon became a May loyalist and in due course, alongside Rishi Sunak and Oliver Dowden, he was trumpeted by Boris Johnson’s leadership team as exactly the sort of centrist non-Brexiteer they were capable of attracting in 2019. Boris rewarded him by putting him into the cabinet at the age of 37 as housing secretary.

Although an ethical run-in from sitting at a dinner too close to the newspaper proprietor Richard Desmond cost him many column inches, what sank Jenrick with Johnson was the self-interest of Tory backbenchers. Ever sanguine about standards in public life, the then PM was more frit about their hysteria over planning reform.

One whip puts it as follows: “the fat man was spooked by the worst of us — Damian Green, Caroline Nokes and Andrew Griffiths. Panicky shits all of them.” Another ministerial colleague notes how “genuinely radical Rob was. It would have simplified everything: properly radical stuff. But then he’s briefed against by Michael [Gove]. Then Boris and Dan [Rosenthal — then chief of staff] collapse. Out goes Rob, in comes Michael. No bloody houses, no bloody votes.”

To this first setback Jenrick responded in the way pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to sums up his character. “He seethed, but he knuckled under. He didn’t cause trouble and he worked his way back,” one current parliamentary colleague said. All Jenrick’s longstanding acquaintances agree on both his genuine emollience and deep-seated ambition. “He was properly professional,” concludes one.

Inevitably a supporter of Rishi Sunak in the mad summer of 2022, Jenrick took junior ministerial office under Truss, then was sent to monitor Suella Braverman after she successfully bounced Sunak into making her Home Secretary. Braverman had two cabinet-attending deputies — Tom Tugendhat at Security, and Jenrick at Immigration — and it’s hard to know who leaked more. To be fair to Jenrick, his open line to Charles Hymas, home affairs correspondent at the Telegraph, resulted mostly in self-promotion rather than bile against colleagues.

At the time, Braverman’s Dougie Smith-supplied media spad, Jake Ryan, despised the constant briefing by the immigration minister. But this relationship was to change after both MPs left the Home Office in November 2023. Another relationship with consequences for the future which resulted from Jenrick’s time in Marsham Street was with the previous home secretary, Priti Patel.

Much is made of Jenrick’s “journey” — he genuinely was radicalised by his time at the Home Office — but in getting there he trashed Patel’s disastrous period as home secretary. Entirely rightly many would say, but Patel was neither to forget nor forgive the blame being laid at her door for her serial immigration failures under Boris Johnson. What was less obvious than his frustration with the uniquely incompetent civil servants at the Home Office was Jenrick’s deteriorating relationship with Team Sunak.

From being their spy in the cab, Jenrick became understandably concerned at how his reports to No 10 increasingly went unanswered — a situation no intelligent Tory saddled with immigration could welcome.

Jenrick appealed multiple times to the then chief of staff Liam Booth-Smith and political secretary James Forsyth that his loyalty at the Home Office should be rewarded with a parachute out. I understand he was bitter about getting neither Justice after the civil service forced Dominic Raab out, nor Energy, which went instead to Sunak’s acolyte Claire Coutinho.

Braverman sealed her fate by getting more applause than Sunak at the 2023 Tory conference and was sacked shortly thereafter. With the incomprehensible tone deafness which marked his leadership, Sunak threw away the party’s most potent weapon against Nigel Farage and distracted the lobby with the return of David Cameron. This was Jenrick’s moment of decision.

Right-wing backbenchers such as John Hayes urged him to quit the Home Office (“It’ll be the making of you”). Had Sunak offered him the home secretaryship instead of James Cleverly, he would have stayed. But Sunak didn’t — and Jenrick, after agonising, went.

During the winter of 2023, Jenrick threw himself into backbench conclaves discussing how they’d rebel against Sunak and Cleverly’s clear welching on the Rwanda scheme. At the same time, a slightly ludicrous “air war” against Sunak was being waged by former spads with their “grid of shit”. Jake Ryan was foremost amongst them, simultaneously advising Braverman to step back from the limelight Jenrick was walking towards.

MPs who had formed the backbone of Braverman’s 2022 leadership bid as tribune of the ERG right began to drift towards Jenrick. This was not a simple process. Even as late as March 2024 Danny Kruger was proclaiming to colleagues how essential a Mordaunt leadership was. “We’ve all got to get behind Penny!” the Christian traditionalist urged of the trans rights sword-carrier.

Lavish videos began to be seeded out, with Jenrick explaining alongside former minister Neil O’Brien — a plum catch for any leadership campaign — how the government’s failure on immigration was real, and how it was to be solved. Other Tories immediately noted how much cash was being splashed on these efforts. This was to be a recurrent aspect of the Jenrick leadership bid. He seemingly spent more money on his effort to be leader than any other candidate.

“All of the 2019 intake were invited to Jenrick’s Eye Manor and Vincent Square homes,” one MP who lost her seat noted. “Michal [Berkner, Jenrick’s wife] is a great thing. If anything actually made him right-wing, it’s her.”

When Sunak quit, six candidates stood: Jenrick, Badenoch, Stride, Cleverly, Patel and Tugendhat. Suella Braverman did not. The small number of right-wing MPs meant that if both she and Patel had stood, they would likely have competed to be the first eliminated from the leadership race. With effective control over the party in the hands of “modernisers” since 1990, the right didn’t have the numbers in the parliamentary party.

I reckon in strictly factional terms, no more than 20 of the party’s 121 MPs are consciously on the right. From election night onwards, all Tory politicos knew just one number, 41: the votes needed to be sure of getting through the MPs’ ballots (one third of MPs plus one) to be put in front of the mass membership.

With Boris-Brexit-wave MPs and Red-Wall breakthroughs swept away in the 2024 general election, the conversation amongst what passed for Tory right powerbrokers was, “Who can get through [to the final two]?” more than, “Who can win once there?” Polling always made a case for Braverman as being the right-winger who could have engaged the membership, but Danny Kruger in particular turned against her viability with colleagues.

One reason for Jenrick’s loss was that few MPs who backed Patel voted for him

Jenrick surprised everyone with his pole position on the first and second ballots, but faded thereafter. Indeed, the brilliant whipping of John Lamont (since dropped from the frontbench by Badenoch) notwithstanding, they expected to go out in the final round, and would have done so but for the Cleverly chaos. One reason for his fatal loss of momentum was that very few of the MPs who voted for Patel followed through to Jenrick.

Furthermore, his leadership team was bitterly divided between a mostly press-facing clique centred round Sam Armstrong (a pet of Danny Kruger’s criticised by every single person I’ve spoken to); Jake Ryan and (out of his depth as chief of staff, former Jenrick spad) Jack Lewy; and a set of proven, experienced campaigners. “Their obsession was tweets,” one of the latter noted. “Everything had to go viral. We had to seem ‘different’ … But we didn’t have a correspondence unit! And speeches were being written on the day.”

Another lamented that “they” (Armstrong and Ryan) “sucked up to people in SW1 but were bored by the party in the country. We just could not get lines out of them. It’s good, I suppose, that Rob was loyal to them, but it was a mistake.” A constant preoccupation was Jenrick’s height and weight in videos.

Longtime Tory activist Richard Murphy was briefly installed as campaign director reporting to Lewy, but left almost immediately. “This was our single biggest problem,” one key Jenrick ally concluded. “The campaign was run by people who had never run one before and wouldn’t listen to those of us who had. But more than that, there was no one true senior person below the principal we could actually complain to about things and get sign-off from. And Rob was on far too many WhatsApp groups. It was a mess. Where was Kruger or anyone taking charge? You can’t have a candidate running his campaign, or his wife.”

Could the right have won? Against the vibes-based vagueness of Badenoch, they needed to provoke her into attacking them. However whilst “Rob was hot on the ECHR, he was wet on everything else”, an ally said. “He ran away from the trans stuff.”

The opportunity to provoke Badenoch was somehow squandered (Jenrick’s team had copies of their rival’s diva-like demands to events organisers and didn’t use them). The case for who Nigel Farage should truly fear wasn’t made. Tied now as shadow justice secretary to supporting the ECHR, Robert Jenrick either has one more big resignation in him, or obscurity beckons again.