Robert Jenrick has been walking a tightrope. Over the course of the Conservative party conference he has been having to navigate the tricky situation of playing both the prince over the water and the loyal lieutenant to Kemi Badenoch. Mr Jenrick so far has played his cards very well. He is successfully channelling both Bonnie Prince Charlie and Blondin, the man who pushed a wheelbarrow over Niagara Falls. Or even David Miliband meets Stan Laurel.
Today was his most difficult performance yet. Be too bland and he’d join the legions of Tories who might have been king – destined to join the Rab Butler-Jeremy Hunt memorial club. Be too good or punchy and he’d be accused of making a too-early pitch for the leadership – and risk joining the Rishi Sunak-Michael Heseltine Provisional Wing.
Perhaps aware of the tightrope, Jenrick began on the safest ground possible, his opposite number. After the emergency post Ange-pocalypse reshuffle, Jenrick found Sir Keir Starmer had given him one of the greatest gifts a Tory can get: David Lammy as his opposite number. Just the mention of the Sage of Tottenham got the – for once mostly full – conference hall chuckling. Jenrick went through the infamous Mastermind debacle; Lammy had believed that Henry VII succeeded Henry VIII, Marie Antoinette won a Nobel Prize and Red Leicester is a blue cheese. None of this does give us any clue about what the Tories might do in government, but we are fast approaching the point where simply saying they aren’t Labour might be their most effective strategy.
Jenrick also warmed up the audience by giving Lord Hermer a verbal kicking, a man so aligned with the enemies of Britain that in another age he might have qualified for command of the Spanish Armada. Indeed, the very mention of the Attorney-General drew cries of ‘shame!’ in the conference hall. We had momentarily descended into a sort of Tory panto; indeed, there were even theatrical props.
Mr Jenrick had come on stage with an ominous black trunk. Was this his box of tricks? Or his casket? A judge’s wig appeared. Was Bobby J going to wear a series of funny outfits? A stethoscope when talking about health? A fez for foreign affairs? A blindfold to mirror Rachel Reeves’s approach to the economy?
These weren’t just tricks though. There was some meat on the bones. Chiefly, he discussed the beginning of the exorcism of the Blairite possession of our institutions. The Lord Chancellor position would be restored and the Law Lords returned to the House of Lords. The fact that the Tories should have done this day one in 2010 or 2015 or 2019 is sort of by the by.
After successfully navigating the challenge of his speech (and Sky News’s best efforts to smear him as ‘far-right’ for stating observable fact about the ghettoisation of many British cities) next up Jenrick had an obstacle course as he left the hall. This was descending into Takeshi’s Castle or It’s a Knockout territory – all that was missing was Prince Andrew. His main obstacle was Emily Maitlis who, along with Nicholas Watt from Newsnight, chased Jenrick along trying to ask him questions. Jenrick aced this round by speaking to Watt while successfully ignoring Maitlis five times in a row. If only the rest of us could do the same!
The day could have gone much worse for the Tories
In conferences past, delegates have faced abuse – sometimes even dodging eggs and other projectiles hurled by tankies outside the Manchester Midland hotel. It’s perhaps a measure of the party’s growing irrelevance that this year not even the Stop Brexit Man Steve Bray could be bothered to attend. The nearest we came to an actual protester was when Tory London assembly member Andrew Boff, wearing a ‘trans rights are human rights’ T-shirt, heckled his way through a panel on women’s rights and biological sex. Margaret Thatcher once observed that the facts of life are conservative – alas, it seems some ‘conservatives’ are still struggling with the facts of life.
This panel was one of the day’s highlights – featuring Claire Coutinho in conversation with Olympian Sharron Davies, who has campaigned to keep biological males out of women’s sports, and Marion Calder, director of For Women Scotland, a group which has successfully taken the SNP to court to force them to uphold the Supreme Court ruling on biological sex. Both showed, ironically, serious balls. ‘People keep asking who funds us,’ said Calder, ‘and I keep saying it’s YOU, the Scottish government, because you keep losing.’ Davies praised Kemi Badenoch for upholding women’s rights and biological reality while it was still unfashionable to do so.
All in all, it was a day which, beginning as it did with a slew of councillor defections to Reform, could have gone much worse for the Tories. Indeed, between moral courage on women’s rights and a plan for exorcising the Blairite monstrosity from our body politic, it made you glad the Conservative party still exists. The problem is that it has taken them so long to start speaking sense that you get the impression nobody is listening anymore.
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