Jill Egglestone

🚨 We need to talk about “Honest Bob” Jenrick and his “journey” to the Dark Side... On 23 October he told his followers: “Under Labour, HMRC will reach into your bank account and seize your money. Under Reform, you’ll get a £30 rebate if HMRC leave you stuck on the phone for 30 mins.” Guess which party made it legal? Direct Recovery of Debts was announced by George Osborne in 2014 and passed in the Conservatives’ 2015 Finance Bill, while Jenrick sat on the Tory benches. Labour now wants to extend it, which is open to criticism, but the power is his party’s creation. The £30 rebate is a gimmick: every £30 knocked off a tax bill is £30 less for public services, so in the end the rest of us would pay for it. Selective memory is something of a habit with “Honest Bob.” Before entering Parliament, Jenrick qualified as a solicitor in 2008 and practised corporate law, including in Moscow, at firms such as Skadden Arps and Sullivan & Cromwell. In the run-up to the 2015 general election, by which time he was already Newark’s MP, his office received a £5,000 donation from Alexander Knaster, a businessman appointed chief executive of Russia’s Alfa Bank by the oligarch Mikhail Fridman. Private Eye, which noted the donation in 2020, reported that although Knaster was already a large donor to the party, this was the first, and at the time still the only, occasion he had given to an individual MP’s office. The Eye suggested the connection went back to Jenrick’s Moscow days at Skadden, where his wife was a partner and had at one point acted for the Alfa group. On 21 March 2018, while Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, Jenrick held an official meeting with Israeli billionaire Idan Ofer, described by his team as a “family friend”. At the time Jenrick was handling a request for government support from Sirius Minerals, whose mine would have been a direct commercial rival to Ofer’s Cleveland Potash. His team said he informed officials and recused himself, but did not say when. According to the Guardian, he remained in charge of the Sirius application for around six months after the meeting. In March 2019 one of Ofer’s companies gave £10,000 to the Conservative Party. Ofer said the donation was arranged through Conservative Friends of Israel and not discussed with Jenrick. Between November 2019 and January 2020, Jenrick was embroiled in the Westferry Printworks affair. On 18 November 2019 he sat next to Richard Desmond at a Conservative fundraising dinner, where Desmond showed him a promotional video of his £1 billion scheme. On 14 January 2020, against the advice of the planning inspector, Jenrick approved it, the day before a new levy would have cost Desmond around £45 million. Two weeks later Desmond gave the Conservatives £12,000. Jenrick eventually conceded the decision was unlawful because of “apparent bias”, and it was quashed. It was this episode that earned him the nickname “Honest Bob”, courtesy of the Guardian’s John Crace. In spring 2020 Honest Bob was embroiled again, this time over lockdown travel, after trips to his parents’ home in Shropshire and his family home in Herefordshire during Covid restrictions. On 24 October 2022, as Minister of State for Health, he found himself embroiled in the “40 new hospitals” pledge. In a written answer he stated: “The Government is committed to building 40 new hospitals by 2030. Six are currently under construction and one is now completed.” The pledge was later shown to be heavily delayed and badly overstated. In January 2025 the 2030 deadline was abandoned, and by July 2026 only seven schemes were open to patients. The National Audit Office now expects the last of the hospitals to be finished in 2045-46. Then came what may have been the pivotal moment. On 31 October 2022, Home Secretary Suella Braverman told the Commons that “the British people deserve to know which party is serious about stopping the invasion on our southern coast.” The next day, Jenrick, her new immigration minister, refused to echo her. He told Sky News: “In a job like mine, you have to choose your words very carefully. And I would never demonise people coming to this country in pursuit of a better life. I understand and appreciate our obligation to refugees.” The far right noticed. On 6 November 2022 the Observer reported that far-right elements had attacked Jenrick for rejecting Braverman’s language. One post on the Traditional Britain Group’s Telegram channel accused him of “treason” and referred to his “Jewish faith”, alongside an image of Pepe the Frog, the cartoon adopted by the alt-right. (Jenrick is not Jewish; his wife is.) This appears to have been an inflection point. Shortly afterwards, Honest Bob underwent what looks like a fake Damascene conversion. On 25 April 2023, defending the Illegal Migration Bill at a Policy Exchange event in central London, Honest Bob argued that “excessive uncontrolled migration” threatens social cohesion: “And those crossing tend to have completely different lifestyles and values to those in the UK and tend to settle in already hyper-diverse areas, undermining the cultural cohesiveness that binds diverse groups together and makes our proud multi-ethnic democracy so successful.” Critics accused him of dog-whistling to the far right. Pressed on what those different “lifestyles and values” were, he declined to say. In July 2023 it emerged that Honest Bob had been embroiled in an altogether pettier cruelty: as immigration minister, he had ordered cartoon murals of Mickey Mouse and Baloo at the Kent Intake Unit, a reception centre for unaccompanied child asylum seekers, to be painted over. In December 2023 Jenrick resigned as immigration minister, arguing that Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda legislation did not go far enough. In 2024 he ran for the Conservative leadership and lost to Kemi Badenoch on 2 November. That campaign later became embroiled in controversy. The Electoral Commission referred a donation to the Metropolitan Police, which has since opened an investigation. The donation was £100,000 from The Spott Fitness Ltd, of which £37,500 allegedly originated with a US businessman, and foreign donations are illegal under UK electoral law. Honest Bob denies any knowledge of the alleged source and says his campaign complied with all electoral laws. On 14 March 2025, at an Aldridge-Brownhills Conservative Association dinner, Honest Bob described a visit to Handsworth in Birmingham as “one of the worst integrated places I’ve ever been to” and “as close as I’ve come to a slum in this country”. His evidence? “In fact, in the hour and a half I was filming news there, I didn’t see another white face.” When the Guardian published the recording in October, he stood by the remarks, insisting his point was about integration rather than skin colour. Yet skin colour was the only measure he offered. Handsworth’s population is around 9% white, so failing to spot a white face in 90 minutes tells you about the area’s demography and nothing about whether its residents mix, work or belong. Handsworth is home to long-established Caribbean and Punjabi Sikh communities that have been part of Birmingham for generations. To offer their faces as proof of a failure to integrate is to strongly imply that being properly British means being white. Even Andy Street, the Conservative former mayor of the West Midlands, said Jenrick was wrong and called Handsworth a very integrated place. The New World later reported that the fly-tipping segment of his GB News report on Handsworth had in fact been filmed a mile and a half away, in neighbouring Aston. On 12 August 2025, JD Vance, holidaying in the Cotswolds, invited Jenrick for an hour-long private meeting before a wider evening drinks event attended by others including Danny Kruger. Vance did not meet Badenoch in person during the visit. The two men have travelled similar roads. In 2016 Vance called Trump “reprehensible” and “cultural heroin”, and privately wondered whether he might be “America’s Hitler”. By the time he sought the 2022 Senate nomination he had apologised and won Trump’s endorsement, and in January 2025 he became his vice president. That same month, Jenrick turned up at the anti-migrant protests outside the Bell Hotel in Epping. Nigel Farage was unimpressed. On 18 August 2025 he posted: “Jenrick is a fraud. I’ve always thought so, this quote proves it.” The post, which is still up, carried a trimmed version of what Jenrick told Sky News in November 2022, a week or so into the job and in the middle of the Manston overcrowding crisis: “More hotels have been coming online almost every month throughout the whole of this year… What I have done in my short tenure is ramp that up and procure even more.” Jenrick later said the clip had been taken out of context, pointing to other comments at the time in which he called the hotel bill “disgraceful”. Two days later Farage followed up with a video, which appears since to have been deleted, though it is still available online. In it he said that as immigration minister Jenrick had been “boasting that he’s going to open more migrant hotels than all the ministers that went before him”, and he told viewers: “This man is a fraud, this man is not to be trusted, and certainly his party aren’t either.” Five months later, Farage’s party welcomed him in. It is worth noting how Farage made his case. His graphic quietly cut the parts of Jenrick’s answer that mentioned his predecessors and the November peak in crossings, leaving a bare boast. One accused of fraud, the other cropping the evidence: they were made for each other. On 7 October 2025, Jenrick closed his Conservative conference speech with: “Let’s build this new order. Let’s take our country back.” Critics noted that “new order” was the term the Nazis used for the regime they intended to impose on Europe. “Let’s take our country back” has a long lineage. A National Front leaflet from 1978 urged: “It’s our country… lets win it back!” In 2009 America’s Tea Party rallied under “I want my country back.” On 16 June 2016 Farage unveiled his grotesque “Breaking Point” poster, which even George Osborne said had echoes of literature used in the 1930s. Andy Wigmore, communications director of Leave.EU, the campaign co-founded in 2015 by Arron Banks and Richard Tice, with Farage as its most prominent supporter, later described the poster to the researcher Emma Briant as something “we had put out”. In the same recorded interviews, he said of the Nazis’ propaganda machine: “It was very clever, the way they managed to do what they did.” That same day, 16 June 2016, the Labour MP Jo Cox was shot and stabbed in her constituency by Thomas Mair, a far-right extremist. Witnesses said he shouted “Britain first”, and one heard “This is for Britain”. Nobody has shown that the poster played any part in Mair’s actions, and this piece makes no such claim. But that day remains a stark reminder of where the language of taking our country back can lead. Four days later, Farage addressed a public meeting in Gateshead beneath a giant backdrop reading “We Want Our Country Back”. The slogan did not go away. On the eve of the 2024 general election, Farage had a crowd on Clacton Pier chanting “We want our country back.” Jenrick’s closing line belongs to that lineage. Two weeks later, on TalkTV, Jenrick said: “I probably would ban the burqa.” Downing Street pointed to the UK’s “proud tradition of religious tolerance”. In December 2025 Honest Bob told the Financial Times the Conservative Party was “my home”, and he told a Telegraph reporter he would “never, ever defect”. On 15 January 2026, Badenoch sacked him for plotting to defect to Reform UK. She said he had told her only days earlier that he had “no plans to defect”. He joined Reform the same day. Jenrick’s new leader was, until very recently, one of his favourite targets, and the contempt between the two men had run both ways. In August 2024 Jenrick told Good Morning Britain: “I want to put Reform out of business.” In March 2025, at the same Aldridge-Brownhills dinner where he made his Handsworth remarks, he told the room that “Nigel Farage can’t even run a five-a-side team, so he’s not going to be able to run a country. They’re not a serious party.” In June 2025 he quipped that Farage “had one too many” before announcing he would spend £3.5 billion extra on welfare. Yet at the press conference unveiling his new recruit, Farage, the man who had called him “a fraud”, admitted: “I wasn’t sure that his conversion was genuine.” He had since come round, he said, to the view that “this guy has been on a genuine journey”. Jenrick insisted he had acted “out of conviction”. Two men who had spent years telling the public the other could not be trusted now asked the public to trust them both. So what are we to make of all this? Psychology may offer one explanation. Psychologists, and ordinary observation, recognise that people who are bullied sometimes move towards their bullies rather than away from them. One response is appeasement: reducing the threat by aligning with the aggressor, flattering them, or adopting their language and views. Another, which Anna Freud called “identification with the aggressor”, runs deeper. The target internalises the bully’s attitudes or style, sometimes as a way of feeling less powerless. A third is the pursuit of status and protection. In social and political settings especially, people may drift towards the side that once attacked them once it looks stronger, hoping to share in its power. The parallel with Honest Bob is hard to miss. In November 2022 he refused to call people crossing the Channel an “invasion”. For that the far right turned on him, branding him a traitor and making a point of his supposed Jewish faith. Within six months he was telling a Westminster think tank that those crossing had “completely different lifestyles and values”. Within three years he was promising a “new order”. The man Jenrick sat down with in the Cotswolds fits the same pattern. JD Vance once called Trump “reprehensible” and privately wondered whether he might be “America’s Hitler”. Once Trump’s movement had proved itself the stronger side, Vance apologised, sought Trump’s endorsement and rode it all the way to the vice presidency. The third pattern, of drifting towards those you once condemned once they hold the power, describes both men’s careers with uncomfortable precision. The sequence fits the patterns: appeasement after hostility, followed by a longer-term absorption of the attackers’ worldview. It’s a theory, not a diagnosis. The more familiar explanations of unprincipled opportunism, blind ambition, and electoral calculation remain on the table, and none of them rules out the others. Indeed, Jenrick’s own words make the case for unprincipled opportunism better than any psychologist could. In November 2022 he said he would “NEVER demonise people coming to this country in pursuit of a better life”. Within six months, those same people had “completely different lifestyles and values”. In December 2025 he insisted he would “NEVER, EVER defect”. Within weeks he had, to the party of a man whose post calling him “a fraud” is still up for anyone to read. With Honest Bob, “never” seems to last only as long as it is useful. Now he tells voters that Labour will reach into their bank accounts, using a power his own former party created while he sat on its benches. Selective memory, it turns out, is one of the few things Honest Bob has been consistent about.