Many people have been resistant to Robert Jenrick’s ambition. Rishi Sunak, his former ally, failed to restore him to the cabinet. Conservative Party members failed to elect him leader last year, preferring the more authentic and distinctive Kemi Badenoch.
The look on his face as he congratulated his opponent on her victory in that election was a warning and a promise. I will not rest until I have reversed this result, it said. And he has been running ever since, as Keir Starmer joked at Prime Minister’s Questions after Jenrick completed the London Marathon in 4 hours, 40 minutes.
His video on Thursday, in which he intercepted fare-dodgers on the London Underground – “Do you want to go back and pay like everybody else?” – was the high point of his campaign so far. It was an instant classic in the art of the political stunt: simple, effective and watched by millions.
Personally, I thought he overdid the “country is going to the dogs” element. I think London is the best city in the world and the Tube network is great, but it does annoy me to see people take advantage of lax enforcement, tailgating or pushing through the barriers to travel without paying.
He struck a chord. He identified himself and his party with the message: the law-abiding majority shouldn’t pay for a rule-breaking minority.
None of the attempts by his political opponents to counter his stunt were successful. He was a hypocrite, it was claimed, hounding the poor and desperate when he was forced four years ago to repay £122 in expenses for a car journey between his constituency and London because he took the train and claimed for both. That didn’t work because IPSA, the independent body that runs MPs’ expenses, accepted that it was a mistake; and Jenrick did, in effect, “go back and pay like everybody else”.
The more feeble criticism was that Jenrick didn’t have permission to film in the Underground station – not that it should matter, but in fact Transport for London appears to require permission only for “filming any commercial or promotional content on the TfL network”. The rules don’t specify whether “promotional” includes promoting the career of a restless politician.
Jenrick’s opponents would be better employed asking why his stunt was so successful. Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, should be kicking himself for not having thought of it himself.
Jenrick is good at this stuff. A previous social media video he made on the Chagos deal was a well-executed documentary that went into some detail about the history of the islands. Not strictly his subject as shadow justice secretary, but again an effective communication that made life a bit harder for the Labour government – which has still been unable to justify the treaty in terms that the median voter can understand.
Labour is generally bad at this stuff. Ten years ago this month, in the closing days of the 2015 election campaign, Ed Miliband unveiled Labour’s pledges carved on a tablet of stone in a Hastings car park. My description of it is still quoted on Wikipedia: “The most absurd, ugly, embarrassing, childish, silly, patronising, idiotic, insane, ridiculous gimmick I have ever seen.”
The Conservatives have had their misfires too. No one can really explain why William Hague’s ride on a water slide at Flambards theme park in Cornwall didn’t work, but it didn’t, so the baseball cap with “Hague” written on it became a symbol of his inauthenticity.
George Osborne tells the story of when he tried to dramatise a policy to get rid of red tape by lighting a bonfire of actual regulations on the beach outside the Tories’ annual conference – only to be prevented by the local council’s rules banning fires on the beach.
Boris Johnson, on the other hand, was a walking perma-stunt who managed to turn glitches into gold, as when he was stuck on a zip wire holding two union jacks. Like conservative populists the world over – the word “populist” means “more popular than liberals think they should be” – Johnson could drive a “Get Brexit Done” digger through a wall of polystyrene bricks and not look ridiculous.
Donald Trump could do something as simple as frying chips in McDonald’s and serving drive-through customers, or drive a rubbish truck, and dominate a whole news cycle. And Javier Milei of Argentina had his chainsaw.
In Britain, though, Jenrick’s only rival is Ed Davey, whose low-content election campaign, featuring him bungee-jumping or falling into water, was highly efficient in converting votes into parliamentary seats.
Most of the Tory former cabinet ministers that I speak to expect Jenrick to succeed in his campaign to depose Badenoch eventually, and they think that Jenrick will do a deal with Nigel Farage.
They may be right about the first part, although I think they are wrong about the second part: I cannot see what is in it for Farage.
A political party cannot survive by stunts alone, but it might help the Tories a bit, at the margins, to have an unconventional communicator such as Jenrick in charge. Such is the depth of the party’s crisis that it might even be worth the ridicule that will be attracted by changing leader yet again.
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