What is the most significant development in the Tory leadership contest in the past week? The race is heating up ahead of Wednesday’s first knock-out round, with numerous launches in recent days. Yet it’s a development on Sunday that could be the most significant. The Sunday Telegraph reported that Neil O’Brien is endorsing Robert Jenrick. The ex-minister supported Jenrick’s main rival Kemi Badenoch two years ago. But the Tory MP also has a history of being a canary in the coal mine for the Tory party – offering an early indicator of potential danger and failure for various leaders.
O’Brien has often been just ahead of Tory mainstream thinking
In 2016, O’Brien was a close ally of George Osborne, the Remain-backing chancellor, working as his special adviser. Yet he is reported to have voted Leave, on the grounds that it could be the only chance in his lifetime. It is voters such as O’Brien that ultimately meant David Cameron’s gamble on an EU referendum proved to be misjudged and ended his premiership. When Boris Johnson was teetering on the edge in 2022 having suffered the resignation of both Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak, O’Brien quit along with four colleagues (Kemi Badenoch, Alex Burghart, Lee Rowley and Julia Lopez) in a joint resignation letter.
It was viewed as a pivotal moment in the turbulent days before Johnson reluctantly quit. Then, in November 2023, O’Brien resigned as a minister under Rishi Sunak to spend ‘more time’ with his family and focus on his ‘constituency’. One could argue that it’s about this time that Sunak’s premiership hit its rockiest patch – after party conference failed to turnaround his fortunes and Sunak sacked Suella Braverman as Home Secretary, thereby sparking a new chapter of Tory civil war.
In short, O’Brien has often been just ahead of Tory mainstream thinking. The fact that he has rowed in behind Jenrick rather than Badenoch – whom the rest of his Johnson resignation team are backing – is significant. It could also say something about the direction the party is going in on migration. Since heading to the backbenches, O’Brien has spent much of his time focussing on migration, arguing that it is not making Britain better off and it was time to listen to voters. O’Brien and Jenrick published a paper with the Centre for Policy Studies, calling for the Home Office to be broken up in order to create the ‘Department of Border Security and Immigration Control’. They said it could get the number of legal arrivals down to tens of thousands and recommended measures to get there that they said could be taken before the election.
Now the election has come and gone and Jenrick’s leadership pitch is making migration its focus. Speaking on Monday, the leadership candidate, whose supporters say is ‘nailed on’ to make the final two, said:
‘On immigration, I’ve been very, very clear to people about what my view is. I think that we begin to bring back the millions of voters we lost to Reform by immediately, this autumn, being clear about where we stand.’
This involves a cap on legal migration set to tens of thousands and on illegal migration withdrawal of the ECHR: ‘I have come to the conclusion that we have to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. I don’t believe it’s reformable’. This position goes further than candidates such as Tom Tugendhat and James Cleverly who have only spoken of reforming it. On Monday, Kemi Badenoch suggested that pledging withdrawal is a simplistic answer to a complex question.
Will this debate shape the remaining two months of the contest? A recent poll for the Daily Telegraph found just a third of Tory members want to leave the ECHR, so it’s not clear that it is yet the vote winning policy for the membership. However, that could change. The view of those around Jenrick is that the party is on a journey when it comes to the ECHR – an issue which previously saw some Tory MPs threaten to quit the party if withdrawal became the policy. They argue the election loss means many are looking at the issue again. Once even One Nation candidates like Tom Tugendhat are talking about reforming the convention, they suggest that it shows the party is in a place where withdrawal is on the table. On past evidence, the fact that O’Brien is backing Jenrick on this platform suggests that sceptics could in time come round too.
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