Robert Jenrick, ‘anglofuturist’
For now, Generic is dreaming
I watched Robert Jenrick’s speech at the Now and England conference last week with some curiosity. Not because the speech was interesting. Rather, it’s because he might be the next, and perhaps even last, leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party – to use the full name of what is on course to become Britain’s third or even fourth party next time we go to the polls.
Since the general election last July, Reform has become the most popular party in Britain. Dissatisfaction with Labour now it’s in government is one cause, with YouGov’s recent MRP forecasting that almost 200 Labour seats would flip cyan if election results reflected current polling. The other big cause is a collapse in support for the Tories, who in that same projection would bag only 46 seats.
Those numbers mean that Kemi Badenoch has faced regular calls to take an early exit from her leadership of the party, a mere eight months after she started. Recovering from the electoral slump of 2024 is a difficult task, and some of her critics have been agitating for her downfall since she won. But if your job as leader of the opposition is to win the next election, she is failing.
Jenrick, as runner up to Badenoch last November, is favourite to succeed her, albeit in a sparse field. And indeed the speech he gave at a conference supposedly dedicated to English nationhood sounded more like another pitch to become Conservative leader (much to the chagrin of at least one man I passed on my way out the lecture hall).
To be fair to the man nicknamed ‘Generic’, he gave some attention to the “low ebb” within England. There is, he said, “too much pessimism” and “fatalism” in the country, a “malaise”, if you’re of Norman bent. Migration is too high, too many people are on benefits, housing is too scarce, degrees no longer lead to good jobs, petty crime is endemic etc etc.
I agree with him that the Conservatives have inflicted tremendous damage in only 14 years in office. His response was less compelling. Declaring himself an “Anglofuturist”, he pledged to restore the industrial base, transform the country into a tech leader, improve public services, instil us again with a sense of patriotism – and shrink the state, because it is still the Tory party after all.
It is at least futuristic in the sense of believing this country has one. But the Englishness was harder to detect. Indeed, the conference itself was compered by a Californian named in the traditional American style: English job title + Armenian surname = Fisher Derderian. Such people do little to quieten the rumours of American money pouring into British politics through conservative think tanks, the underlying motives being not entirely wholesome.
The audience were at least of traditional Toryboy stock, “legions of gelled Malfoys, spotted with misshapen Crabbes and Goyles”, as the New Statesman put it. One more sensitive chap I spoke to asked me if I was disillusioned by “the betrayal” of the last Conservative government(s). I said yes, though as somebody for voted for Keir Starmer last year, perhaps not in the same way as him.
While even Starmer can half-heartedly complain about us becoming an “island of strangers”, Englishness remains an uncomfortable thing to praise. Unlike Britishness, we cannot pretend it is just a matter of values. When the audience applauded Jenrick’s condemnation of recent migration policy, I felt uncomfortable. I suspect even among the majority who want migration reduced, that discomfort with any hint of nativism is widely shared.
That is at least evidenced by reports of the afternoon’s proceedings, which I didn’t attend, with speakers that had some public reputation to lose demurring from more provocative audience questions. As Laurie Wastell writes in the Spectator, these is a division between those “who prefer to ignore ethnicity, ancestry and demographics on the grounds that such topics are both immaterial and icky” and “those who are unapologetic about believing that the English are an ethnic group, that England is our home”.
Dominic Cummings would tell Jenrick that he will struggle to straddle both groups. The Vote Leave director’s strategy during the Brexit campaign was to sideline Nigel Farage, whose nativist stench put off the middle classes. Right now it looks like voters will hold their noses and elect the king of the gammons as the next prime minister, and accept some unpleasantness. As for rosier futures of Englishness, it looks like Jenrick’s the one dreaming.