Pretender Jenrick flubs his audition for the Tory throne

The man hailed as the most credible threat to Kemi Badenoch delivered such a poor conference speech that perhaps that was his Baldrick-style cunning plan all along – that he could not be accused of trying to outshine the leader, writes John Rentoul

Terrible jokes, no structure, flimsy policies and ChatGPT-level platitudes. If that speech was Robert Jenrick’s audition for the top job, it went badly. The reception was merely polite from those in the Manchester hall.

I suspect that the chatter about a challenge to Kemi Badenoch’s leadership will recede for a while. The idea that there will be an attempt to oust her next month, as soon as the rules allow it at the end of her first year, seems less likely now.

Robert Jenrick’s speech meandered so much that it formed oxbow lakes that were completely cut off from the main stream (Getty)

Perhaps that was Jenrick’s Baldrick-style cunning plan – to deliver a poor conference speech so that he could not be accused of trying to outshine the leader, knowing that any overt sign of disloyalty would go down badly with the party faithful.

The only other explanation is that Jenrick is an artificial politician who has not fully completed the transition from Cameron via Boris Booster to Tory Farageist, and so keeps malfunctioning.

He is good at social media videos, coming across as genuinely concerned about the state of Britain and trying, energetically and articulately, to do something about it. But a party conference speech is a different medium, and he came across as if the programme was glitching.

The joke about Liz Truss’s negotiation to go on Big Brother breaking down because she wanted to be paid by the minute baffled the audience, some of whom, statistically, must have voted for her to be prime minister. The riff on David Lammy’s performance on Celebrity Mastermind was undignified.

The shadow lord chancellor made jokes about Liz Truss and David Lammy (Getty)

The speech meandered so much that it formed oxbow lakes that were completely cut off from the main stream. An opening line about “four famous blondes” who would explain how the Tories could get out of their current predicament – one of them was Truss – came back three-quarters of the way through the speech.

He said: “I know you’re all wondering: who’s the fourth blonde that I mentioned at the beginning?” We weren’t, actually, because we had lost count and assumed he had moved on.

But go on, who would point the way to how to recover the fortunes of the party? “Is it Margaret Thatcher?” he asked. “Not this time,” he said, because she is dead – even though there are effigies of her in glass cases in the exhibition centre displaying some of her outfits. “Boris Johnson?” The leader whom he had once done so much to promote and defend? Dismissed with a curt “No.”

The fourth blonde was actually Michael Heseltine, a Tory leftie but one who wanted to “fight, fight, fight” the Labour Party.

The fourth ‘famous blonde’, Michael Heseltine (PA)

It was a curious and confused message to a party that wants to know how to “fight, fight, fight” off the threat of being replaced by Nigel Farage. Jenrick’s answer to that question was implied rather than explicit. It was to offer similar policies to Farage’s, and to hope that the voters wouldn’t notice that the Tories had been in government recently.

One of Jenrick’s policy announcements was that he would root out “activist” judges by restoring “the office of the lord chancellor to its former glory”. This would “reverse the constitutional vandalism of Tony Blair” – whose name he pronounced with a theatrical sneer, “Bleaghh” – and mean “no more quangos” to appoint judges.

But Tony “Bleaghh” was prime minister 18 years ago, and since then the Tories have had 14 years to reverse the vandalism but chose not to – mainly because they knew perfectly well that the lord chancellor, a politician, didn’t personally appoint judges; he was always advised by officials and other senior judges.

It was the kind of Reform-lite policy that the crowd wanted, but they wanted more. They wanted a bit of rogue ambition – the sort of naughtiness that Johnson was good at in the days when he was circling Theresa May like a predator closing in on its prey.

Kemi Badenoch probably feels safer in her job after Jenrick’s speech (PA)

The most they got was an accidental double meaning. “Make no mistake,” Jenrick declared at one point. “The old order is collapsing.” He didn’t mean that Badenoch was wobbling on her plinth – it was actually a passage about how the elite (of which he used to be part) were giving way to the voice of the people.

By the time he got to the end – a strangely unconvincing plea to “take our country back” – Badenoch must have felt much safer on her pedestal.