David Gauke is a former Justice Secretary and was an independent candidate in South-West Hertfordshire at the 2019 general election.
I have always had a bit of a soft spot for Robert Jenrick.
I say this not to reassure his new colleagues in Reform UK that he is a welcome addition to their party, although no doubt a few positive words from me will go a long way to assuage any concerns that they may have. It is more that I have always found him courteous and pleasant on a one to one basis.
Whether as a by-election candidate grateful for support, a new Treasury minister eager for advice, or as a colleague happy to go out of his way to offer a lift after a party away day, I have always found him friendly and considerate.
When I took on the independent sentencing review chairmanship in 2024, we met. It was clear he was not going to support many of the conclusions I was likely to reach, but volunteered that he was not going to criticise me personally. He did not need to do that, but stuck to his word.
Even on the commonly made charge that he is an insincere shape-shifter, altering his politics to suit his own personal interests, I question that this is entirely fair. Yes, he moved seamlessly from being a Cameroon to a May-loyalist to a Johnson-booster and then Sunak-ite (he was never a fan of the Truss premiership, to his credit) before he emerged as a scourge of immigration and wokery, but this was not just about opportunism.
Jenrick is a politician of enthusiasm and energy. Give him a task, and he is fully committed to it. Make him the minister to liberalise our planning laws and he will come forward with radical proposals to do just that. Make him the immigration minister with a brief to reduce immigration and that is what he will do. If murals, designed to bring comfort to traumatised children, have to be painted over because there is a risk they will only encourage more the blighters to come here, so be it. A sense of proportion is not always a strong point.
The classic example of the perils of AI is the AI given the task to maximise the production of paperclips. Unconstrained, the AI creates a world in which every available resource – at catastrophic cost – is deployed to produce paperclips. In his single-minded focus on whatever is the task ahead of him, there is something of AI paperclips-production-maximiser about Jenrick.
On this basis, the criticism of him that his political journey is driven solely by expediency is unfair. His time as immigration minister genuinely radicalised him. It also means that those mainstream Conservatives who believed that he was on a trajectory to win the Tory leadership and then revert to a more centrist position were being complacent. He is not a figure of the traditional centre right anymore.
I am conscious that this column appears to be something of a defence of Reform’s latest Parliamentary recruit.
It is not intended to be.
He might have been straightforward in his dealings with me, but he clearly was not in his dealings with Kemi Badenoch and the shadow cabinet. He has repeatedly expressed opinions in recent months that are, at best, distasteful. And, even though I think his political journey is genuine, it is also conveniently in the same direction as he perceives the wind is blowing. He has obviously concluded that he was not going to assume the Conservative Party leadership anytime soon and that there would be greater opportunity in a party topping the polls but woefully short of talent (save for its not particularly youthful leader).
But defection remains significant. Jenrick was a big figure in the Conservative Party.
He narrowly missed out on the party leadership in 2024 and for much of 2025 he was the star performer. He had a clear analysis and strategy. He considered that the fundamental problem was the right was disunited and that this had to be resolved by seeing off Reform by the Conservatives denying them any political space or, failing that, reaching some kind of accommodation. This meant matching Reform’s stridency on issues like immigration and Islamist extremism, if not exceeding it. Certainly, at times, Jenrick’s language went further than anything Nigel Farage has said (at least, since he left school).
The counter-argument is that no one is better at being Farage than Farage.
Where the Conservatives are at an advantage is on the economy, where Farage’s most memorable intervention was his wholehearted support for the Truss/Kwarteng mini-budget. The emphasis on the economy has been the strategy pursued since the party conference and it is beginning to bear results in the polls, with the Tories overtaking Labour and closing the gap with Reform. With the salience of immigration falling, the shift in approach has been vindicated.
With Jenrick gone, the debate over strategy should be resolved for two reasons. First, the balance of opinion within the party has shifted because the leading voice for a more populist approach is no longer there. Second, it is even more obvious that the Conservatives are not going to win the votes of those most exercised by immigration to the exclusion of all other issues.
Should Conservatives have a credible policy on controlling immigration? Yes.
But will it win the support of those who will decide how to vote purely on which party will do most to reduce the number of immigrants in the country? No, it will not.
Jenrick, as Conservative MP, might have kept some of those voters Tory, but he will take them with him to Reform.
Badenoch, therefore, has little choice but to double-down on her focus on the economy. Just as she exploited the Jenrick defection with great tactical skill to win good short term headlines, she has to respond strategically too.
There are now a set of voters that the Conservatives cannot reach, but a futile attempt to pursue those votes will also put off others. Jenrick – whatever I might personally think of him – is not widely loved by the wider public. For some, a Conservative Party without Jenrick is a more attractive proposition than it was with him to the fore. Those voters should be within Badenoch’s sights.
The focus on the economy needs to be redoubled. Business support needs to be rebuilt. There needs to be a clear-eyed assessment of what is holding the country back. The case for a market economy needs to be remade. The Conservative Party should have the answers as to how we can make the country prosper.
There also has to be a recognition that there are many people who hold centre right values who are not voting Conservative. Some did so but have moved elsewhere or stayed at home in recent elections. For many younger voters, they have never found the Tory Party an attractive proposition since reaching voting age. The party has to speak to them more persuasively if it wants to reassemble a new coalition of support that can win it office.
Jenrick has gone. He is not an untalented politician but his loss is an opportunity. His strategy would have failed the Tories and failed the country. Instead, Badenoch should enthusiastically take the party in a different direction, away from populism. The country needs a strong Conservative Party positioned on the centre right. That goal is now more attainable than it was before.
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