Over a glass of fine claret at 5 Hertford Street, the exclusive private members’ club in London‘s Mayfair, Robert Jenrick was adamant. He made clear to Nigel Farage that Reform had to dump one of its most prized policies.
Jenrick – then a member of the Tories but planning his defection to Reform –demanded a promise that the party would restore the two-child benefit cap being scrapped by Labour in April at a cost of £3 billion. He was appalled that Reform supported Labour’s plans.
Duly, the policy reversal became the centrepiece of Jenrick’s first speech yesterday as Reform UK’s Shadow Chancellor.
That encounter at the private members’ club was the first of a series of conversations between the two men that ended with Farage agreeing to restore the cap in a major policy U-turn and Jenrick deciding in turn to make his high-profile defection last month.
‘There is a perception in some quarters that Reform is not serious about reducing the benefits bill,’ Jenrick told me shortly after his speech at the Plaisterers’ Hall in the City of London.
‘Nigel and I agreed that while Reform’s policy to scrap the cap for British workers was well intended, the country just can’t afford it.
‘We are crystal clear a Reform government will restore the cap as part of our comprehensive plan to cut welfare spending.’
Looking markedly younger than his 44 years, Jenrick was sporting a pair of designer spectacles I had not seen before.
Robert Jenrick making his first speech as Reform UK’s Treasury spokesman in the City Of London on February 18
Jenrick is pictured with Reform UK leader Nigel Farage
Has he reached that age where the eyesight begins to deteriorate, or is it to make him look serious? He didn’t say.
Whatever the case, appearance is everything in politics. And the man who lost 4st with the help of Ozempic when he was running for the Tory leadership in 2024 might need to go on the drug again.
He tells me he has piled on 6 lb courtesy of Farage’s tradition of long liquid lunches.
‘I’m now running for 40 minutes to an hour three or four days a week,’ he says.
Jenrick had been a Tory Party member since he was 16, when William Hague was leader. He predicts his former party, which fell to a record low 121 seats at the last election, is close to extinction.
He claims that, in private, senior Shadow ministers agree with him. ‘They talk privately that they could go down to 50 or 60 seats next time.
‘The only places the Conservatives can survive at the next election are pockets of grey affluence. The Tory Party has not learnt its lessons and does not deserve to be given a second chance.’
Yet hasn’t Kemi Badenoch, who comfortably beat him for the Tory leadership, followed Reform’s idea and committed to taking Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)?
‘Yes, finally,’ he agrees, before pointing out: ‘I was the second Conservative minister to call for us to leave the ECHR after Suella Braverman [who also defected to Reform].’
But why jump ship after the party ‘finally’ came round to his way of thinking? ‘I don’t have faith that the Tories will do it. I have seen what is said behind closed doors, including by members of the Shadow Cabinet who say privately, “Over my dead body do we leave the ECHR”.’
Farage speaks at a press conference at Plaisterers Hall in London
Jenrick is pictured with his wife Michal in October 2024
His many critics in the Tory Party scoff at what they call Jenrick’s new-found enthusiasm for Farage-style politics.
Even by his own admission, he has been on a long political journey. He was an enthusiastic cheerleader for David Cameron after he won a by-election in Newark in 2014 when the Tories were in coalition with the Lib Dems.
‘He was an ardent Cameroon,’ sniffs one less-than enamoured former Tory colleague.
‘He was resolutely opposed to Brexit, which he may have noticed was brought about by his new boss Farage. He was also relaxed about mass immigration. It’s why we call him Robert Generic.
‘Yet he’s now reinvented as a digital warrior against our broken borders and the dreaded ECHR.’
Relations with Badenoch are at rock bottom after she withdrew the Tory whip from him, sacked him from her Shadow Cabinet, and ended his party membership after she was presented with ‘clear, irrefutable evidence’ he was plotting to defect.
What’s more, he was going to do so in a blaze of media glory to try to be ‘as damaging as possible’ to the party he used to love. Badenoch scuppered his defection by outing him – and then ousting him.
‘Look, I like and respect Kemi but her platform for the leadership argued it would be rash to quit the ECHR,’ he says now.
‘Many of her supporters don’t agree that we need strict border controls and to cut foreign aid to spend more on defence. I’m sad about where we are now, as the Conservative Party has an incredible heritage with many decent patriotic people, particularly in the membership.’
Robert Edward Jenrick, 44, is a Cambridge-educated lawyer who rose to be international managing director of auction house Christie’s.
His formidable wife Michal Berkner is a top corporate lawyer at blue-chip Baker McKenzie specialising in mergers and acquisitions.
Eight years his senior, she would be the first to admit she’s very ambitious for her husband. Her face, famously, was a picture of horror when Badenoch’s victory was announced in the leadership contest.
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch during a visit to McDonalds in Ruislip, west London, on February 10
Jenrick speaks at a press conference at Plaisterers Hall in London on Tuesday
Jenrick refuses to discuss her salary – reportedly a package of £2.8 million – but says she’s ‘incredibly talented and I’m hugely proud of her. She tolerates my political life, which is a ‘winding road’.
The family home is a 17th-century mansion in Herefordshire, 130 miles from his constituency, where they bring up their three daughters, aged 14, 12 and ten, to reflect their Jewish and Christian heritage.
Michal, who was born in Israel but moved to the US before settling in the UK, takes them to synagogue; he takes them to church.
Bizarrely, one daughter’s middle name is Thatcher after Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. Is that not taking his politics a little far, I ask. Has she forgiven him?
‘She’s too young aged 12 to know what a millstone I have put around her neck,’ he replies, deadpan.
So was Lady Thatcher his role model? His answer is a surprise.
‘No it’s my dad, Bill, who is the biggest influence on my life,’ he says. Bill grew up in Manchester a stone’s throw from the modest street where Labour’s former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner lived as a child.
His mother Jenny, a secretary at Littlewoods pools company, went to the same school as Cherie Blair, Seafield Convent Grammar in Merseyside.
‘Dad left school at 16 to be an apprentice and founded his own business making fireplaces.’
He re-trained as a gas fitter, working from a white van and the kitchen table.
The family was living in Wolverhampton where Jenrick went to a state primary and then fee-paying Wolverhampton Grammar School. The funds were paid from a legacy after his grandmother’s death.
‘Margaret Thatcher’s beliefs were formed round the kitchen table above the shop in Grantham with Alderman Roberts. My beliefs were formed around the table with Dad as we had dinner at 9pm when we talked about whether his work was up or down.’
After his father opened a small shop, Jenrick used to do his homework in the office above, as it had the only computer.
‘I’m proud of Dad and his unbelievable work ethic. He was unashamedly working-class and patriotic. They had no guaranteed income or security. It’s why I’m such a supporter of small businesses,’ he says.
Until a few months ago his father, 85, was still going into his factory four days a week to help make gas fires and wood-burning stoves. The company employs around 100 people.
‘He is my role model,’ he says. ‘I just wish I had said that to him more when I was younger. You never say the things you should to the people you love.’
It was his straight-talking father who sealed his decision to defect. On Boxing Day he distilled down the issue to two questions. Who would Jenrick like to be PM, Keir Starmer, Badenoch or Farage? He opted for Farage.
‘If there was a general election and he wasn’t a Tory MP, who would he vote for?’ When he said Reform, his father replied: ‘Follow your heart.’
‘So I did,’ says Jenrick.
He now spends most days at Reform UK’s HQ in the Millbank Tower in Westminster, which was home to New Labour when Tony Blair was in his pomp.
He says: ‘Just before I quit the Tories, the Shadow Cabinet had an away day and concluded Britain isn’t broken.
‘They must be walking different streets to me. In factories, pubs, offices, even golf clubs they all say the country is in a terrible mess.
Left to right: Zia Yusuf, Robert Jenrick, Nigel Farage, Richard Tice and Suella Braverman stand on stage during the Reform cabinet announcement
‘We need a serious government which has to be radical to sort immigration. We have to weed out terrible practices such as cousin marriages and stop the spread of sharia courts with zero tolerance for any extremism.
‘If the extremists are not British, deport them. I got into trouble for saying parts of Birmingham have become almost no-go areas. But I was rapidly proved right when the police conceded, having tried to cover up the fact, that they were incapable of asserting their authority to keep safe travelling football fans from Tel Aviv. Appalling.
‘We have to make a generational effort to integrate people. They are already grappling with this in Denmark and Sweden. We have to do the same as I’m deeply worried by what’s happening in some of our big cities.’
But his own record on immigration is mixed. In November 2022, one week after becoming immigration minister in Rishi Sunak’s government, he boasted he would put more migrants into hotels.
The number peaked at more than 55,000, which contributed massively to the Tories’ landslide election defeat.
Defending the hotel expansion at the time, Jenrick said: ‘More hotels have been coming online every month. So, Suella Braverman and her predecessor, Priti Patel, were procuring more hotels.
‘What I have done in my short tenure is ramp that up and procure even more because November, historically, has been one of the highest months of the year for migrants illegally crossing the Channel.’
He bristles when I remind him. ‘I inherited a bin fire and in the end I closed 100 migrant hotels and fewer people crossed the Channel when I was immigration minister. I quit the government because the Rwanda plan did not go far enough.’
After his defection, Jenrick said he wanted to ‘unite the Right’ but he’s opposing a pact with the Tories.
‘We have to unite the Right to get rid of this Labour government. I don’t believe it will be done with pacts. The only way to is rally behind Nigel. Party loyalty has to go. If you want to stop Starmer becoming PM again, or worse, Rayner or Ed Miliband, you have to unite behind Reform.’
And both he and Farage are confident that many more Tories will do just that.