Robert Jenrick, J.D. Vance and the bull market for bullshitters
It’s not liars you should be frightened of, it’s the people who want to be lied to
Robert Jenrick: Even his hair, which looks like a wig, isn’t . Pic: PA
The Conservative Party could soon have as its leader the most blatant opportunist ever to climb to the top of British politics.
Robert Jenrick, or as he is known to his bitchy colleagues, Robert Generic, sounds as if his speeches have been written by ChatGPT and looks as if his body was manufactured in a 3D printer.
His every utterance has been refined to appeal to the right and far right. He hates migrants, or affects to. He despises human rights judges, or puts on a good show of it.
It’s an act, scream his moderate Conservative opponents. Jenrick is a phoney. Everything about him is phoney. To use the old putdown, even his hair, which looks like a wig, isn’t.
Jenrick was a David Cameron-era Tory: a relatively moderate chap by the standards of his party. He opposed Brexit on the grounds that it was against the national interest. Leaving the EU would take the UK into a “dystopia,” he declared – which it has, if one can define dystopia as a state of perpetual decline rather than apocalyptic collapse.
He dropped all that pro-European idealism, of course. No smart operator on the make in today’s Tory party gets on by warning about the costs of Brexit.
Today Jenrick is a raging Europhobe, or so he appears to be.
Meanwhile, and as late as October 2022, Rishi Sunak saw Jenrick as a moderate minister who would control the then Le Pennist Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
Now the migration moderation has gone the way of Europhilia in the great Jenrick closing down sale.
To win, Jenrick has become a believer in Le Pennism, Trumpism and any other -ism that might win him the Tory leadership election, which given the radicalisation of the right, means he has no place for the one-nation conservatism he once espoused.
He has waded so deep into the swamp he now wants Donald Trump to win the US presidential election. Or finds it politically expedient to say that he does.
Before I go any further, I need to emphasise to overseas readers how rare it is for British people to support Trump. The 50:50 split of the American culture war does not apply here.
Polls show that only about 20 per cent want Trump to win. But that 20 per cent includes the members of the Conservative party, who will vote for the next leader, and rightists and, for let us use the English language plainly for once, far-rightists in Nigel Farage’s Reform party, whom Jenrick hopes to woo.
A victorious Trump would pull the plug on American support for Ukraine. He would provoke the gravest European security crisis of our lifetimes.
However much you hate the woke, you cannot be a patriotic conservative and support Trump.
But Jenrick does not want to be a patriot. He wants to win, and will say whatever it takes to do it. He is even echoing Trump’s “promise” to deport all illegal migrants – a policy which would require a state of martial law to implement, as even Trump admits.
I could go on. Indeed, people like me do go on and on about how Jenrick is an obvious grifter and charlatan. But Conservatives do not. They ought to be the most worried of all. They ought to be haunted by the fear that Jenrick will take what he wants from them and then betray them when he is in power.
Supporters of Kemi Badenoch, his rival for the leadership, are trying to convince the Conservative electorate that Jenrick will be their Keir Starmer. He will pretend to agree with party militants to get elected and then move to the centre once the leadership is his.
It’s not working. Or not working yet. Right-wing writers admire Jenrick. My colleague at the Spectator Patrick O’Flynn praises Jenrick for having “the zeal of the convert”.
O’Flynn was a leading figure in Farage’s Ukip. He can sniff out a backsliding centrist at 100 paces. Yet he has no doubts about Jenrick’s conversion. Nor, a survey of the right-wing press shows, does any other right-wing commentator. The people who ought to be most concerned about Jenrick’s insincerity take him at face value.
It’s possible that Tory journalists are idiots. More than possible indeed. But their self-confidence reveals the limits of polemics and satire, and in doing so shows how much stronger the radical right is than the radical left.
Two factors give it strength
1/The power of Conservative propaganda
From Jonathan Swift onwards, the assumption behind so much writing in the English satirical tradition is that it is enough to show your leaders are hypocrites who don’t believe a word they say. We believe that, if we reveal their lack of moral and intellectual integrity, we will destroy them.
But motives matter less in politics than moralists imagine. It is a consequentialist business. If you are a right-winger, why do you care whether Jenrick supports your agenda in his heart – assuming, that is, he has a heart. As long as he repeats the required slogans, what is the problem?
The religious language about the zeal of converts is suggestive. Conservatives know something leftish polemicists forget at their peril.
It is all very well damning the hypocrisy of characters like Jenrick. But once the laughter has stopped a hard psychological truth remains. If you pretend to believe in nationalist conservatism to advance your career, the mask will eat into your face, and you end up believing in it wholeheartedly.
Pascal is meant to have said “kneel down, say your prayers, and you will believe”. Annoyingly, and as so often, the lines turn out to be a misquote. But the sentiment holds.
As every propagandist knows, if you can persuade or compel your targets to pretend to believe they may well, in time, actually believe.
You only need to go to the theatre or watch TV drama to know that progressive (or woke) values dominate the general culture. Their triumph has only made the right-wing sub-culture of the Tory press, Tory TV and Tory think tanks more extreme and aggressive.
Once they sign-up for that culture, no one appears to leave. Labour people went off to the far left in the 2010s, and slouched away when its project failed. Despite the disasters of Brexit, Truss and a landslide defeat, no prominent figure on the right has recanted.
It may not be the Hotel California, but the British right has an extraordinary hold over its membership.
2/ The base rules
In any case democratic politicians are in a market economy. They must keep the customers satisfied or its over for them.
Jenrick is hardly a one off. J.D. Vance once described Trump as “America’s Hitler”. But then Trump won the 2016 US presidential election, and took over the Republican party. Vance became such an assiduous bootlicker Trump picked him as his running mate. With honourable exceptions most of the leading figures in American conservatism have followed suit.
As with the British Conservatives and Jenrick, Trump supporters do not treat Vance and so many like him as dubious figures who might betray the MAGA cause. They know full well that they dare not challenge them.
We spend too much time focusing on the faults of individual leaders. There will always be opportunists like Vance and Jenrick, who will say or do anything to get on. They are not frightening in themselves.
The activists who promote them are truly frightening, however. The men and women who want them to be hypocrites, who demand that they are hypocrites, have the real power, and they know it.
They are not troubled by fears that Jenrick will sell them out. They know that he knows that, if he ever betrays them and reverts to his old self, they can and will destroy him.
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It's a weird thing... the KGB doesn't exist... unless you betray them.
Every day I cycle past Waterstones and get to look at their success.... unleashed!
He's a true 21st Century politician, our very own Ron DeSantis. Completely unburdened by ideas or beliefs, he can fake them to order, appearing more convincing than any genuine zealot. Badenoch's problem is she actually believes in stuff, just like poor old Liz Truss. The Thatcher model doesn't work anymore. Jenrick's more of a Johnson - "if you don't like my beliefs, fine, I have others."