I have a recurring nightmare. It starts off well enough: I’m back in December 2019, and listening to the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, address the nation outside Downing Street after securing his whopping majority to ‘Get Brexit Done’.
Suddenly, however, dark, thunderous clouds cast a shadow over that happy scene. In a faraway land, a virus has escaped from a Chinese lab and begun to spread across the world.
Lightning strikes, and I hear the low and terrible rumble of a distant convoy – then see Russian tanks looming over the horizon. Keir Starmer, arm-in-arm with Angela Rayner, stares into the windows of 10 Downing Street, hungry for power, with Sue Gray lurking close behind them.
Suddenly, all around me, once-sane figures in the Tory Party run amok, screaming for Boris’s head. I hear Liz Truss‘s voice and glimpse her for a fleeting moment. Rishi Sunak sprints past me in his too-short trousers.
At last, as the chimes of Big Ben echo around the landscape, I wake up – and realise with horror that much of my dream was true.
Only Tory leader hopeful Robert Jenrick can heal the party and has the personality to take on Sir Keir Starmer, writes Nadine Dorries
Yes, the Tories have once again clambered onto the merry-go-round of a leadership election. On November 2, Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch will become the fourth person to lead our party in just over two years.
We cannot go through all this again in a few months. We have to make the right call this time.
The Conservatives need to choose the best possible leader – not only to put an end to my own bad dreams, but to shake the entire party from its own collective nightmare, which began when they got rid of Boris in 2022.
Our next leader needs two things: the ability to heal the party and the force of personality to take on Keir Starmer and his socialist friends.
Only Robert Jenrick can supply both of these.
You may not know much about Rob. Born in Wolverhampton in 1982, he’s from a working-class background. His dad, Bill, was a gas-fitter and his mum, Jenny, was a secretary from Liverpool – just like my own dear mum, back in her day. So he’s not one of the posh boys who so often have run the upper echelons of the Party.
Rob is from ordinary stock, and his politics chime with millions across the country who believe in family, hard work and small-c conservative values.
Yet what precisely are those values? I shouldn’t need to ask, but many in the Tory Party seem to have forgotten recently.
In August, in an article you can still read on his website, Rob laid out ten ‘Core Principles’ of Conservatism. These would all have been statements of the obvious a few years ago, and are, I suspect, still supported by a clear majority of Brits.
The principles include: ‘Our people and Parliament are sovereign’, ‘Prison works’, ‘Mass Migration must end’, ‘Peace comes through strength’ and ‘We need a small state that works, not a big state that fails’. It was a long-overdue mission statement from a natural leader. And it emphasised how our party has lacked a clear ideology for too long, often – especially on the crucial issue of mass migration – governing from the Left even if it spoke from the Right.
Starmer speaks during a visit to an NHS healthcare facility in east London yesterday
It’s all very well for the Tories to be a ‘broad church’, but it’s quite another thing to have so many sects and denominations that no one knows what you stand for any more. (This incoherence is a big part of why we did so badly at the last General Election.)
So yes, Rob has a guiding sense of purpose. He’s also courageous and tireless – as Rishi Sunak’s immigration minister, he marched willingly into the sound of media gunfire in order to defend the Government whenever he was asked.
Eventually, he resigned from that Government on a point of principle: he believed that the Rwanda Bill, which would have sent migrants to the African country for processing, was ‘a triumph of hope over experience’ that didn’t go far enough to tackle the tens of thousands of asylum seekers arriving on our shores year after year.
Rob has been crystal-clear during this leadership campaign that the time has come for Britain to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights – which migrants often successfully cite in our courts to avoid deportation and which Rob, a former high-flying lawyer, has rightly said has made it ‘impossible to secure our borders’.
He is a man of conviction – and, in politics these days, that quality is as rare as a dinosaur egg.
Some in the party are telling themselves that Starmer and his hard-Left gang have five long years in government ahead of them, giving us plenty of time to rebuild before the next election.
Wrong. The Conservatives are facing serious and growing competition on the Right from Nigel Farage’s Reform – which now has more rank-and-file members than we do – while our former shire heartlands are under threat from the Lib Dems, who are catching up with us in the Commons, with 72 MPs to our 121.
So there is no time to waste. Local elections are as soon as May next year – and the fightback needs to begin now.
If Rob has been honest and frank about what our party needs, he is in sharp contrast to his rival Kemi Badenoch, who has barely uttered a word about policy. At a time when Tories need more than ever to unify, I’m afraid that Kemi, who even her most ardent supporters would describe as abrasive, would bring yet more division, leading us back to all the in-fighting, chaos and psychodrama to which we have subjected ourselves – and, worse, the voters – in recent years.
Robert Jenrick’s critics claim that he is at heart a centrist who voted Remain in 2016 and has only moved to the Right to further his own career. I think they are misguided.
Rob is more aware than anyone that he will have to convince his doubters, if and when he wins, by sticking to his ‘core principles’ and delivering on his promises. If he fails to do that, he will be tarred as a hypocrite.
I, and others, will hold him to his commitment to leave the European Convention on Human Rights – and we’ll expect to see that promise in the next manifesto.
Kemi may be the bookies’ favourite, but polls have repeatedly shown that Rob would win more seats at a general election than she would. One recent survey from Electoral Calculus suggested that he would win an extra 57 seats to her 30.
The Conservatives need to remember that it’s the voters who will finally decide our future – not the party machine.
If Rob is elected as leader, I will know the Tory Party is in safe hands – and we may all sleep a little sounder at night.