Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch are going head-to-head to be the next leader of the Tory party.
Mr Jenrick is best known as Rishi Sunak’s immigration minister, a role he held for just over a year before dramatically quitting in protest over the “fatally flawed” Rwanda plan.
In that time, the former lawyer underwent something of a political transformation. Having entered the Home Office widely regarded as a centrist, he left as a champion of the Right, demanding tougher measures to tackle the small boats migration crisis.
It led to questions over his authenticity, including from Anna Soubry, the former Tory MP and veteran of his first election campaign, who told The Guardian that Jenrick “trims his sails to suit whichever political wind is blowing within the Conservative Party”.
Mr Jenrick would argue he takes a solution-based approach, refusing to shy away from tough decisions.
He will appeal to the Tory Right because of his tough stance on immigration, including supporting the UK’s withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
But he also has support on the centre-Left, having served under Lord Cameron and Theresa May during their premierships, and having been a close ally of Mr Sunak before he became party leader.
What does he stand for?
One of Mr Jenrick’s biggest challenges will be to convince colleagues on the Left and the Right that his beliefs are sincerely held, so they can trust his position is rock solid.
He has put a crackdown on illegal migration at the centre of his pitch to the party, pledging to leave the ECHR, which he has said is necessary to deliver a legally-binding cap on migration and to resurrect the Rwanda scheme.
He has also said he would be “open” to reducing legal net migration to below the “tens of thousands”.
While his arguments on immigration are seen by some as “very Right-wing”, he is adamant that they are “mainstream” views held by “millions of people” across the country.
Mr Jenrick has also said the Tories must become “obsessed” with improving the NHS, claiming that a failure by the previous government to make progress was partly to blame for the wipeout at the general election.
What is his political background?
When Sir Tony Blair won his landslide in 1997, Mr Jenrick, then aged 15, responded by joining the Conservative Party.
He first entered the Commons as the MP for Newark in 2014, having seen off a challenge from Ukip at the by-election to replace Patrick Mercer, the former Tory shadow minister caught in a lobbying scandal.
Mr Jenrick had trebled his relatively comfortable majority of 7,000 to more than 21,000 by the time Boris Johnson won his landslide in 2019. But it collapsed down to around 3,500 under the new constituency boundaries on July 4, as the Tories suffered their worst election defeat in modern history.
Mr Jenrick’s ministerial career began with a job in the Treasury in 2018, where he served until Mr Johnson took over as premier the following year.
He quickly rose to prominence, becoming housing secretary at the age of just 37, but was sacked in a reshuffle two years later after being embroiled in rows over planning and Covid rules. He returned to the front bench as a health minister during Liz Truss’s short stint in No 10, before taking on the immigration brief under Mr Sunak.
What is his family background?
Mr Jenrick was born in Wolverhampton in 1982 to Bill, a gas fitter, and Jenny, a secretary. He has recalled growing up in a “classic small-C conservative household”, with both parents believing in “family, hard work and self-reliance”.
He is married to Michal, a partner in a London law firm and the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. The couple have three daughters, Marina, 12, Sophia, 10, and Lila, eight, who are being brought up in the Jewish faith.
The children attend both synagogue and church at various times, and celebrate both Christian and Jewish holidays.
How does he feel about Brexit?
Mr Jenrick voted to remain in the European Union in 2016, but said in the wake of the referendum that Britain needed to “get on with Brexit”, as that was “now the only sensible course”.
He has hailed Britain’s exit from the EU as the standout achievement of the last government, arguing the Tories lost the general election because they got that done and “nothing else”.
But he has described some of his party’s post-Brexit policies as “naive”, telling a fringe event at last year’s Tory conference: “Where I think we have gone wrong, immediately after leaving the EU we established a legal migration system that was, if anything, even more liberal than the system we had when we were in the EU.”
What scandals has he been involved in?
Mr Jenrick had a turbulent time as Mr Johnson’s housing secretary. Within a year he became embroiled in a cronyism scandal, having overruled a planning decision in a way that benefited newspaper magnate Richard Desmond, who then donated £12,000 to the Tories.
Last month, the controversial development won approval from Labour-led council officials, on Mr Desmond’s third attempt to gain planning consent.
It also emerged during the Covid crisis that Mr Jenrick had seemingly broken lockdown rules by visiting his parents’ home in Shropshire, and that he had travelled between London and his home in Herefordshire.
Most damagingly for his future prospects, he was blamed by many Tory MPs in the south for a perceived zeal to concrete-over their constituencies. He was replaced after two years as housing secretary by Michael Gove, who rewrote Mr Jenrick’s planning reforms.
At the Home Office, Mr Jenrick became increasingly convinced that major reforms to human rights legislation were needed to stop the small boats, and set hares running when he quit over the Rwanda Bill.
The resignation was in sharp contrast to his reputation as a safe pair of hands, which had earned him the nickname Robert Generic.
