TRIGGERnometry: w/ Reform UK MP Robert Jenrick (Transcript)

Everyone recognized you can’t change your sex by uttering words, all of this stuff. So I think your parents never voting for right wing parties and yet you being representing those same values as first a Conservative MP and now a Reform MP, that speaks to something very foundational that’s happened in our country and the west at large, doesn’t it?

ROBERT JENRICK: Yes, I think you’re right. I mean they both grew up in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and in what today I suppose would be called patriotic working class communities in inner city Manchester and Liverpool. And the values that they were instilled in them by their parents. You know, as you say, love of country, family, hard work are exactly the ones they instilled in me when they were bringing me up in the 1980s and 90s.

And although that world was in itself actually very different, I mean their lives, they’d watched essentially the deindustrialization of the country, the kind of businesses that they’d gone into. My dad is an apprentice, we’re all going as a result of trade unions and poor management and the deindustrialization that we saw in that period. But the value seemed pretty constant.

And the sorts of things that I have spoken about in recent years, which are now labeled by some as being on the right or even worse. Sometimes people say that they’re far right or extreme views, which is complete nonsense obviously were just things that people took for granted, that a country has to have borders, that you should have a sensible immigration policy so you don’t undercut the wages of British workers or put pressure on housing, that you’ve got to try and keep regulation low so that people can set up small businesses like theirs.

I mean these are just, you know, these are, these were normal views and represented as I think they still do today, the common ground of British politics. Which is why I always found these debates in politics completely puzzling, where people would be saying, well, you can’t take the Conservative Party to the right or it’s not. It’s not. It’s just grounding it in the views of most people in this country. But a lot of our political and media elites have become totally detached from the views of the people that I grew up around, that I represent now and I believe represent not just a silent majority, but the vast majority of people in this country.

A Political Revolution

FRANCIS FOSTER: And you spoke about coming to power. Well, coming to power, getting elected in 2015. If you look at 2015, that was a different world. That was pre Brexit, pre Brexit party, pre reform. I mean, your entire political career has been in the midst of a political revolution, hasn’t it?

ROBERT JENRICK: It has, it has. A huge amount has happened. I mean, I’ve been elected five times. There’s been a referendum. I ended up serving in the government of five different prime ministers. I mean, you’d have to be, you know, Ken Clark or Michael Heseltine or one of these figures who’d been in politics for 40 or 50 years to have had that career a generation before.

But also, politics has just changed a huge amount. I mean, the issues in politics have changed or at least have sharpened enormously during that period. The kind of politics of Britain I went when I first went into Parliament are so different to the ones today. I mean, when you look back with hindsight, I think it’s possible to say that all of the roots of our current problems actually can be seen in that period.

And I now really have come to view the whole period from 1997 to the present day as one continuum and a period when a huge set of mistakes were made by our politicians, which have now kind of come together in the last few years, like a confluence of wildfires where they’re feeding off each other and creating more and more challenges for the country.

But it didn’t quite feel like that when I was first elected. I think it was possible to believe that the state basically worked, that things weren’t going in a completely wrong direction. But over time, it became very apparent to me, particularly in the last five years or so, that the country’s in a real mess, that it really is going in the wrong direction, and that the people that I want to represent in politics are finding life very, very difficult and have basically been let down by an entire generation of politicians who made bad calls on the most important issues facing the country and in some cases have lied to them, you know, pursued policies which were precisely the opposite of what they were setting out to do.

Is Britain Broken?

And that leads us to the debate that we’re really having in the last week or two, is Britain broken. Which may seem like a simplistic way of discussing, but I do believe that is now at the absolute heart of our politics. Do you believe that the country is in a mess, it’s in a moment of real peril and is at risk of slipping away and requires completely radical change, the end of that whole 20 or 30 year political consensus and the building of something new? Or do you think that it’s not nearly as difficult and challenging as that and you can muddle along with the same old solutions?

That does strike me as the big debate now. And it’s not necessarily a left or right debate. There are people in all of our political parties who can slot into those different camps, both in their views and their natural inclination and character. I would argue reform is the one party which, to a man and a woman recognizes that the country’s in real peril and has to change, whilst the other parties are terribly conflicted on that.

And you have people, including their leaders generally are saying that, no, it’s not as bad as that. And that’s the big divide. The big question, which side of you are you on that debate? I know which side I’m on. I’ve come to that view gradually, but then very suddenly and firmly.

Taking Responsibility

FRANCIS FOSTER: And how have you come to that view, Robert? Because there’s going to be people watching and listening to this going, hang on a minute, mate, you were part of the Conservative government when a lot of these disastrous policies were implemented. This is a reason that we’re here. Fess up. You need to take some responsibility for it as well.

ROBERT JENRICK: Well, I do, actually. I mean, I’ve probably been, when I was in the Conservative Party, I was probably the most frank and honest about the mistakes that it made. The day after the general election, I wrote an article saying that that government completely failed the country on immigration, on public services, on tax. And I’ve fought since then, a public and private argument to persuade the Conservative Party to be as honest as possible as the foundation for changing and rebuilding trust with the public.

My own journey, I’d like to think, is a journey that most people in the country have actually been on. It’s not easy to decry it and say, well, you know, I don’t know, like Ken Clark, you should have exactly the same views you had when you were a child and, you know, you should be set in aspic. Well, I don’t think that’s, but first of all, that isn’t normal. That’s not how most people think. And I don’t think that’s what’s happened in the country over the last 20 years. Well, mostly gradually come to the same conclusions that I have.

A True Convert on Immigration

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Let me just ask you something more specific because I remember a while ago we’ve been talking about having you on the show for a while. Somebody said to us, you’ve got to have Jenrick on because he is a true convert. And what they meant was they said that you went into the immigration department fairly, you know, soft and kind of gentle on things. And by the time you’d come out you were pretty hardline because of what you saw and experienced. Is that a fair characterization?

ROBERT JENRICK: Yes and no. I mean, I think the, my, the roots go back deeper than that actually.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay.

The State’s Systemic Failures

ROBERT JENRICK: In most of the government departments that I served in, I ultimately came to the conclusion that the state was failing. And one experience compounded the other.

So when I was Housing Secretary I went in and wanted to build more homes, wanted to get the country building again generally. Because it’s not just homes, is it? It’s roads, railways, it’s data centers, factories, you name it. And found that almost nothing can get built in this country.

We’re letting down generation after generation of young people because they can’t get on the housing ladder. There were campaign groups that were making almost impossible to achieve our objectives, often using spurious regulations like neutrality to prevent 100,000 homes being built, and members of Parliament putting small minorities above the obvious long term interests of their constituents, let alone the national interest. And ultimately a Prime Minister in a government that was not willing to do what was necessary.

So they frustrated the ambition to build more homes, to radically improve the planning system. Then during COVID I saw the state kind of in all its pomp, trying to be as overbearing as possible, yet very powerless with one or two exceptions. The vaccine program or whatever people reach to. By and large, most of the things it tried to do were failures.

Whole government departments were on the verge of collapse. Programs were failing, billions of pounds was being wasted. The state was unable to respond to a moment of national crisis.

The Home Office: A Complete Bin Fire

But you are right to say the Home Office was the most stark and impactful of all of those experiences. Because I walked into a department which I didn’t have experience of previously, I’d never been there and I hadn’t probably thought as deeply as some people had about immigration. And it was a complete bin fire.

The department by which I really mean the state was enabled to do the most basic functions you’d expect, keeping the public safe, securing our borders. You had thousands of people coming across on small boats, billions of pounds being wasted, hotels being booked left, right and center in towns and cities across the country. You had no data or understanding really, of what was happening.

Every day some new crisis would happen that there’d be an outbreak of infectious diseases at Manston Camp, where people were being brought immediately upon arrival. You’d have appalling crimes occurring. I remember the day when I discovered that a veteran in Bournemouth had been murdered by an illegal migrant who’d come into the country posing as a child, been given into the care of foster parents and then in a school, and then had gone on to kill someone.

And I did what I don’t think my predecessors did do, or not so much, which was actually to go and meet the people who were the victims, who were on the front line. So I went to the council estate on the top of the cliffs in Dover, where the residents had, when the boats were in those days, still arriving on the beaches, rather than the appalling taxi service that we’ve created now, illegal migrants were getting out of the boats, clambering up and were often being found in the gardens or even in the homes of people because they were looking for food or drink or money or whatever and listened to their experiences or actually went to the hotels to see what it was like for the people living in Stoke or Peterborough next to the hotels whose lives were being turned upside down.

And it was easy for the Home Office to say, well, it’s some rundown Victorian station hotel that no one cares about. Well, actually, it’s opposite the station by the statue of Josiah Wedgwood. It’s the pride of place in Stoke on Trent, and it’s a total disgrace now that it’s full of illegal migrants.

A Political Class Letting Down the Public

And those experiences were very formative to me. It left me feeling, firstly, that the state, which is unable to perform its most basic functions, secondly, that we, as a kind of political class, were massively letting down the public. And so many people were indifferent to that because their own lives were insulated from those experiences.

It wasn’t them living next to these hotels, it wasn’t their kids who couldn’t get on the social housing waiting list. They were a world away from the experience of the people on that estate in Dover.

And then probably the worst thing that radicalized me the most was the sense that the responses to this were all a sham. The intelligent people knew that these things were not going to work, and yet they still put their names to it. You know, you’d have “stop the boats,” “smash the gangs.” There would be slogans which were parroted out by people who were not fools.

You know, these were smart people who understood what was happening and yet in their hearts, they knew this was not going to work. But they either didn’t care enough or showed such kind of disregard for public opinion that they were willing to go along with it and pretend that something was going to happen when it really wasn’t.

The Rwanda Policy: A Sham

The experience I remember the most searing one of all was a couple of days before I resigned from the Cabinet over the Rwanda policy, which was basically a sham and it wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t strong enough. Not the idea itself was wrong, but it was so weak, the version of it, because it didn’t exclude the ECHR and the merry go round of human rights appeals.

That would have happened, as evidenced by ultimately, what did happen in that after the general election, Yvette Cooper walks into the Home Office and of all the people who’ve been rounded up to go on those flights, only two people were still in custody. Everyone else had had to be released. Ultimately, that’s one of the reasons why Rishi Sunak called the early general election. Because he knew the policy was going to fail.

But we had a Cabinet sort of committee meeting in Downing Street in the Cabinet Room, to sign off on the bill that was supposed to go through Parliament, that became the Rwanda Bill. And everyone there knew it wasn’t going to work. It was obvious. It was just, in fact, people joked about it round the table.

LAUGHTER

Why do we stick this turn of phrase in to be, because that kind of was going to fool people. And of all that group of people, I was the only person who’s willing to say, I just do not believe this is going to work. And no one really disagreed with me, but they just were not prepared to do what was necessary and so went along with it and were willing to look the British public in the eye.

And when I remember walking out of Downing Street, it was a cold November evening and thinking, what would my constituents think if they had been sat around that table listening to that conversation? They would have been disgusted and appalled by it. And that was just emblematic of what was happening in government.

Bad decisions. A sham, really, where people were lying to the public and not prepared to do what was necessary to fix the big problems facing the country. And I suppose from that point onwards, I have tried to tell the truth, to be willing to be honest about the problems that are facing the country. And above all, not to defend the indefensible, which is one of the things I said last week when I left the Conservative Party.

I’m not going to do that ever again. And if I can play a role in politics, it will be by saying very clearly, what are the problems facing this country? How do we fix them? And try to push the establishment, the government of the day, to actually do it for once and do what my constituents in New York deserve to see happen.

Political Suicide or Inevitable Truth?

FRANCIS FOSTER: When you describe the events, I completely believe you. But I also think, hang on a second, isn’t that just political suicide? Because eventually what’s going to happen if you pursue policies that you don’t believe in, that are essentially a glorified sham? Eventually the truth will come out.

ROBERT JENRICK: Well, that’s what we’ve seen, isn’t it? I mean that, that was, I mean, in the pure politics of it, that was the absurdity of the situation, that it was obvious this wasn’t going to work and it was obvious the Conservative party was going to get smashed at the ballot box if solutions were not found to that issue and others, because not just about immigration, you can say the same about why are we not building homes, why are living standards stagnating, net zero, that’s impoverishing people and de-industrializing our country.

But it’s this pursuit of simple solutions in order to get by rather than actually tackling the root cause of the issue and being willing to do some very tough things. And that is at the heart of this fracture that there is in British politics between those people who pursue that tinkering around the edges strategy because it’s the easy way out or because they care about their own respectability and they don’t want to take on shibboleths like international law or leaving treaties really getting to the heart of the problem and those people who are willing to do that.

And we’ve seen the same frankly with this Labour government where once again there’s no real desire to create proper plan to address the big challenges facing the country. And so the decline that we’re in just goes on and on and on.

A Moment of Truth

And the rubber’s hit the road. Now the country can’t continue like this. I mean, it can, but it will just slip, it will start to slip away. And some of these issues now are almost unavoidable at some point. The public finances for example, you’re not going to be able to be sat here in 10 years time and no one has tackled the size of the state and the out of control spending and borrowing that there is right now.

So on many of these issues we’re reaching a moment of truth where someone and some party has to grip the country, tell the truth to the electorate and get on and do what’s best. And I fundamentally believe that people want that now. People don’t want to be lied to anymore. They are willing to understand trade offs and to see someone get on and do things and really blitz the big challenges facing the country.

Understanding Trade-Offs

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, we’ll talk about understanding trade offs because you may be being optimistic. I wish more people understood the idea that if you want certain things, you can’t have certain other things. And we’ll talk about that.

But you’re not the first person that sat across from us having been a cabinet minister or indeed a Prime Minister, who’s talked about the fact that when they got into a department and they started pulling levers, what they found out is those levers don’t go anywhere. The signals don’t get, don’t reach some kind of destination.

So there’s some simple narratives that are spread about, you know, it’s the civil service, it’s resistant, they have their own ideology, they won’t do what you want to do, or, you know, overall incompetence. We haven’t hired the best people or whatever, or it’s actually, you know, cabinet ministers never wanted to achieve those changes in the first place, as you said.

Why is it that when well-meaning talented people go into departments as members of a government and try to do things, they find, as you did, or as you say you did, that it’s not possible to do?

The Failure of Political Leadership

ROBERT JENRICK: Well, I think it’s all of those things. I generally think it’s a bad captain that blames the ship and the crew, and so a part of it has to be the politicians themselves. It can’t just be saying it’s the civil service, you know, the blob, whatever you want to. Although there are undoubtedly issues there.

Part of the issue has been, firstly, a lack of will to do what’s necessary. And from whom? From politicians, from our most senior politicians, some of whom, I think, just didn’t know what they wanted to achieve. You know, all really of our recent prime ministers have disappointed in different ways and none. I mean, I think Liz Truss is probably the one who had the clearest idea of what she wanted to achieve in office, although did not execute it successfully. So she’s perhaps in a different category.

But all of the others you really aspired, even craved the role of prime minister. But when they got the great prize, they didn’t know what they wanted to do with it. They didn’t have a deep conviction and the consistency that you need to stand by the ministers who are trying to do it, not to flinch when things get difficult. And that became painfully apparent.

I think many of them actually just—they supported ideas which were failed ideas. They took a few very big but very bad calls in politics. I mean, we can talk about some of them, but whether it’s net zero, mass migration, a big state, they perpetuated ideas which were failed ideas. I think some put their own personal respectability above doing what was necessary.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You’re talking about something like leaving the ECHR?

ROBERT JENRICK: Yeah, I think that’s the most classic example of that, where the debate has shifted quite a lot in recent years, without question. But, you know, I would argue that it’s not—people are not all entirely honest in saying that they now support leaving the ECHR. You know, if actually confronted with—I suspect a lot of those people wouldn’t do it.

But certainly a couple of years ago, there were definitely people who just felt this was kind of a dirty argument that they wanted to be someone who was seen as virtuous and could go to conferences or appear at Davos or pursue non-executive directorships after they left politics and taking on issues like that, they were just not prepared to do it, even if they knew that it was probably the way to resolve the issue and that was a problem.

The Weakness of the State

But it is fair to say all the other things you said as well. I mean, the state is very weak in our country at the moment and that has to be addressed, whether that’s reform of the civil service, the quangos that we have right now, which are unaccountable to ministers, so that you struggle to get things done, even if you do have somebody who isn’t a technocrat but is actually a meritocratic, determined person who wants to fix things.

And then this network of laws that have grown up really since the Blairite period, which seem superficially attractive—Equalities Act, Climate Change Act, Human Rights Act—but which together have created a web which means it’s immensely difficult for ministers to get on without being judicially reviewed or challenged on different things.

So unlike predecessors in the 1980s who took on different but equally challenging problems the country was facing, it’s now very, very difficult to effect change. And that contributes to the sense of frustration and anger and disillusionment there is in the country because people are voting for change. And yet politicians just don’t seem to have the ability to show progress or at least not quickly enough.

And you’ve seen that with Labour, you’ve certainly seen some of the last Conservative government. I believe people will vote for change again whenever the next general election is. If, say, that’s a reform government, then if people that government was not able to bring about visible change quickly, then I really worry what would happen to our politics as well as our country.

Because if people had chucked out a failing Conservative government, then chucked out a failing Labour government, and then voted once again for something else and that didn’t succeed, then people would just throw their hands in the air, wouldn’t they? Say, what’s the point?

For those of us who’ve chosen to now throw their weight behind reform as the best vehicle to fix the country, it’s incredibly important that we use the next two or three years to do what previous oppositions have not done, which is develop a serious credible plan and a proper team that’s capable of actually changing the country and showing change quickly so that you can give a sense to the public that things are going to get better.

The Danger of True Believers

FRANCIS FOSTER: And how much of this is ideology as well? How much of this is people really believing in these radical policies like net zero? Whatever criticism you may level against Ed Miliband, I don’t think you can say he’s being disingenuous. You look in his eyes, he’s a true believer.

ROBERT JENRICK: Yeah, I think Ed Miliband is the outlier in the present cabinet in that he does know what he wants to achieve. He had given it thought, he had a plan, he knows how to get things done. He’s probably a capable, intelligent, competent person. It’s just I fundamentally disagree with what he’s trying to do. And I would argue it’s being absolutely disastrous for the country. Those are the most dangerous people.

But in a sense, we, you know, on the right, we have to do that ourselves. But, you know, but with the right policies that will actually fix the country. It does feel to me, I mean, to the point I tried to make earlier, the political economy of the last 20, 25 years is broken. And within that, there’s a number of ideological choices that have been made which have their roots lie in that kind of Blairite, Brownite era. But the last Conservative government didn’t disabuse them. In fact, in many cases did more of them.

And they are failed ideas which have been proven to fail, caused immense damage and now need to be swept away. That isn’t happening at the moment under the Labour government. The question is, can it be swept away and a new political order brought in at some point in the future, hopefully after the next general election.

Failed Ideas of the Last 25 Years

And within those would be mass migration, which Tony Blair started. But the last Conservative government just increased dramatically. And actually in terms of the mix of countries and cultures that came into the country has made it significantly worse. The obsession with net zero that has de-industrialized the country at a rapid pace, made us poor and uncompetitive. Probably the single biggest problem for our economy right now, failure to build anything.

Because successive governments have just given in to NIMBYism and not reformed the planning system so that you can’t get a road or data center or factory built, let alone the homes that young people need. It’s just—and then for young people it’s meant social contract has essentially been shredded over the course of my adult lifetime. You know, I mean, there are other ones as well. The bureaucratic state, the rise of quangos, you name it.

There is an ideological framework that has built up over 20, 30 years which I think has run its course now and that has to end. And some people can see that. Some people can’t. I believe you’ve got to have now a radical new set of policies to fix the country.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Do you think the two big political parties are no longer fit for purpose? If you think that essentially they’re broad coalitions, both Labour and Conservative, of people that you look at and you go, is that really tenable? Is it tenable to have a left of center liberal with a hard left socialist outlook? I mean, not really. Is it?

Both Parties Are Broken

ROBERT JENRICK: No, I think they are both basically broken now. They are too broad. So they’re ideologically incoherent. And you see that in both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. They in different ways have contributed to breaking the country. And so there’s been a massive loss of trust in both of them. And I don’t think that’s coming back anytime soon.

I mean we might be sat here in 10 years time or 15 years time and people have a different point of view. But I don’t believe in the next few years in this electoral cycle, people are going to have faith in the Labour Party or decide to give the Conservatives the keys again when they’re kind of the arsonist who made all these mistakes not so long ago. People aren’t fools. They can remember that and they see the same faces as well on the front bench who were the ones who made the mistakes not so long ago.

And to my point about change or the status quo, both parties are really prisoners of their past and of the set of failed ideas and they are struggling to break out of that. I don’t think they’re going to, I don’t think they’re capable of changing or at least not fast enough given the problems that the country faces.

And that’s why people are prepared in a way they haven’t been for generations to give something new a chance and say, you know what, let’s give reform, in my case a chance. Because the other parties just seem like they failed so badly and they can’t change, won’t change. In fact, if they were in government again, they probably make the same mistakes all over again.

Why Not Defect Earlier?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Robert, why don’t you leave and defect right after the election? Because presumably you haven’t discovered your worldview you have now in the last week or two. Right?

ROBERT JENRICK: No, that’s fair. I mean the—I mean it’s certainly true that the last general election I stood on a quasi-independent platform in that I rather like Suella. You know, I was putting things on leaflets that were not Conservative Party policy, like leaving the ECHR and knocking on doors, reminding people how I’d resigned from Rishi Sunak’s cabinet. And my activists would say, well if you’re a reform voter, Rob’s more reform than reform and so why bother, you may as well keep supporting Rob and so on.

But I had a deep loyalty to the party. You remember I joined the Conservative Party when I was age 16 in Wolverhampton after the 1997 general election. There were not many 16-year-old Conservatives anywhere, let alone in Wolverhampton. It was back then and it was a sort of—it was actually a contrarian act because at that stage that was, you know, the height of Blair. And most people my age were excited by the what I think turned out to be the false promise of that Blair-right era.

But then, and I stuck with the Conservative Party through good times and bad. I was never like an insider in the Conservative Party, you know, I wasn’t all the history of the on the A-list or had these big figures in the Tory Party, you know, hooking me out and trying to promote me. But I was always a kind of grassroots conservative. That was very much the kind of leadership campaign I ultimately fought. It was the grassroots out of London. You know, the people who voted for me were the members in the north, the Midlands, Wales, East Anglia. It wasn’t Kensington and Chelsea and the kind of more fashionable part of the Conservative Party establishment, they actively campaigned against me.

But I wanted the Conservative Party to succeed and I perhaps naively believed that I might be able to change it. And you know, I looked to people, there aren’t many examples, but there are people who have led other political parties where they fashioned it into something at least for a period that was very different to what it had been before.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Blair did that.

ROBERT JENRICK: Like Blair and, and these, you know, when I talked to the Conservative Party, those were the examples I gave. You know, you had to be painfully honest about the mistakes that you’d made. Apologize but it’d be a sincere one where people could genuinely see that you shared the anger at the failure. You weren’t just saying it for the short-term benefit and then change the party.

And that change would be painful because it had to involve taking on your party like Blair did. Not just trying to seek unity for unity’s sake, but if you want to leave the ECHR, say from the beginning, I believe we have to leave the ECHR. Some people didn’t like it then part company with them because you know, you have to have some religion at the heart of the broad church in a party or else no one will believe it and bring forward different people from the next generation, different ideas, and almost create a new Conservative party.

And I think with hindsight, that was—the party just wasn’t prepared to do that. It wasn’t prepared to confront its past. It wasn’t prepared to change. It was too willing to slip into nebulous ideas like what are our values and our principles, but not really get to the heart of what had gone wrong, have a diagnosis of why the party had failed in government. And over the course of the year and a half, two years that followed the general election, there were just numerous occasions where it became painfully apparent to me that the party was not capable of changing.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Like what occasions?

ROBERT JENRICK: Well, they may seem small in and of themselves, but they built on one after the other. I mean, I give you recent ones. Over the Christmas holidays, when I was really mulling over some of the final stages of deciding what to do, I woke up, like most of the country did, to the news that Starmer had celebrated this Egyptian extremist Al Fattah coming into the country and retweeted that this was wonderful news and we should all rejoice.

And looked at his social media, saw that he was a thoroughly nasty piece of work. Anti-Semitic, anti-white. He said the police should be killed, that Downey should be burnt down. The list went on and on and on.

FRANCIS FOSTER: All standard Labour policies. Really?

ROBERT JENRICK: Well, yeah. I mean, natural client for Lord Herman.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

ROBERT JENRICK: And so I went, I did what I’ve been accustomed to doing. You know, I went on social media, went on the TV, said that this guy was terrible, he should be deported. And then imagine my surprise when complaints went in about me within the Conservative Party, saying, well, you can’t talk about this because you’re drawing attention to the fact that the last Conservative government gave this man citizenship.

And the root cause of the whole problem is that he has citizenship and that numerous senior people in the Tory party went off to Egypt and campaigned for him, saying that he, the number one priority of the UK and Egypt supposedly, is to get this guy to come back home. I can give you other examples as well, but if I just say examples like this showed to me that the party was not prepared to confront its past.

And to be honest about that, to say, like I did when somebody asked me, what do you think about us giving the Tories giving him citizenship? I’m ashamed that the Conservative government gave him citizenship. And if you can’t even acknowledge the mistakes that you’ve made, I don’t see a world in which you can change, restore the public’s trust, and persuade people that if by some miracle you’re able to get back into government, you do things differently in the future.

The Conservative Party’s Lost Mission

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What I was going to ask is what you’re describing, and I don’t think this is unusual. It happens to many organizations, political parties, groups of human beings. In general is a group of people who fundamentally forgotten what their central mission is, which is to serve the country and to serve people. Instead, it’s an organization that’s focused on itself. Yes, on its own survival, on its own internal strife. Is that an accurate description of the Conservative Party today?

ROBERT JENRICK: Yes. Yes. I think it’s become, it’s like a sort of Westminster dining club now, where people are clinging on to the vestiges of power, enjoying being members of Parliament, having titles which actually in reality mean nothing like shadow this, shadow that, but have forgotten what the purpose of this is. You’re in politics to try to change the country and to do that you’ve got to have a very different attitude where you’ve got to actually understand the challenges that the country’s facing and bring forward solutions to it.

I also just think that one of the problems the Conservative Party faces today is that too few Conservative MPs really believe in anything at all. There’s definitely a left of the Conservative Party and there’s a little bit of a right, although that really is now going en masse to reform. So I don’t think there really will be a right of the Conservative Party going forwards.

But the biggest group in the Conservative Party are decent people who are drawn to public service as a constituency MP. The idea of ultimately serving in government as a minister, but don’t have a very deep conviction one way or another. And the problem with those people is that you get blown around in the wind by events. You know, in our incredibly fast paced world today of social media and when you’re faced with a country with immense challenges like the one we have today, you have to have people who have a very, very strong sense of why they’re doing this, what do you want to achieve?

They kind of gripped with it, they’re restless people who are like waking up in the middle of the night worried about things and thinking ideas, who are walking the streets. You know, they might be privileged in their own lives, but want to understand how tough it is for other people. You know, how do you get law and order back? How do you secure our borders? How do you raise living standards?

And that is just not a description of today’s Conservative Party. It’s by and large a group of decent people which have come together in a kind of cozy club which is insulated from challenges the country faces and don’t see the urgency. They do not really see that Britain is in peril, that the country that we know and love could slip away and has to be arrested with serious radical policies. They don’t want to do that.

And those people who do, and there are some still within the Conservative Party, I honestly think they’ve got to now leave the Conservative Party and join reform, because that is the vehicle for radical change now in the country. If you want real change, you’re not going to deliver that through the Conservative Party.

Reform UK: Conservative Party 2.0?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because there is a worry, Robert, and I’m glad that we’ve touched on this. And a lot of people in reform and supporters of reform are seeing more and more Conservatives defect and going, hang on a minute. Well, if we just get all the old Tories coming to reform, aren’t we just creating the Conservative Party 2.0? This is not what we want.

ROBERT JENRICK: No, it mustn’t be that. It really mustn’t. Look, undoubtedly it needs experience. And you know, Nigel says we can’t, he can’t win. One minute he’s accused of being a one man band and then the next minute he’s got all these other people who some of whom are actually very well known. And so it’s demonstrably not a one man band anymore. And he’s being criticized for bringing in those people.

But where you’re right is that it’s got to have freshness to it. And I think you do that in two ways. Firstly, when you do bring in people from the Conservative Party or indeed any other political party, we should be trying to attract people from the Labour Party or others as well. They do have to be people who both share the values of reform and share this sense that the country is in peril, that our political class have failed the country and have that kind of burning, fierce desire within them to fix things.

And that is why, you know, when I speak to someone like Zia Yousef, who’s a genuine political outsider, successful businessman who’s come into politics without having served as a member of Parliament for anyone else, you know, I think I probably have more in common than with him than some people might think, because both of us have a disdain for the political class that has governed the country in recent years.

And then I think the other thing you’ve got to do is attract people who’ve not been in politics at all. And that strikes me as more important than attracting a small number of remaining Conservative MPs who might be very ideologically aligned with reform. You want to get people who are business people and veterans and farmers and doctors and people who’ve been great prison governors or NHS Trust chief executives, people who’ve been spurned by the two old political parties and bring them into politics.

And that’s starting to happen. But that’s the great opportunity of reform to attract those people and then propel them into the front line of politics so they can actually run the country in a way which it hasn’t been run in recent years because you’ve had politicians who are predominantly career politicians, often doing jobs that they know nothing about, often for very short periods of time, without deep understanding or ideas on how they fix those things, and with often disastrous results.

So it’s finding the right balance which is going to be key to reform. But it mustn’t lose its radical edge. I mean, if it does, I may as well just stayed in the Conservative party. The reason, or one of the reasons I was attracted to reform and to want to be part of this team is that it is the best vehicle for radical change in the country.

The Nadim Zahawi Question

FRANCIS FOSTER: Well, we’re talking about people defecting from the Conservative Party. I look at Suella, I mean, that makes complete sense. I look at yourself. That makes complete sense. Nadim Zahawi and his behavior during COVID, I’m going to be honest with you, Robert. To me, that is, and to a lot of people in this country, that is a pretty big red flag when you think about sort of the epitome of the modern Tory party and what’s wrong with it. Zahawi, in my opinion, represents that.

ROBERT JENRICK: Yeah. Well, I think Nigel’s view, who ultimately is the decision maker in these, is that Nadim is somebody who’s an incredibly successful businessman, somebody who’s built world class businesses from nothing, whose own personal life story is very inspiring. Came as an immigrant fleeing persecution, Saddam Hussein, and built a very successful life here in the UK who brings ministerial experience and a vaccine program.

And whatever your view might be on vaccines, it was demonstrably the world’s most successful vaccine program. You know, we were the leading country in the world to do that, bring in the private sector to do it. So I think there’s a lot that he offers to the party.

But the broader point you’re making is undoubtedly right, that there can be a small number of people who bring experience of government, who know what needs to be done, who can learn from their mistakes as well and have the honesty to acknowledge the mistakes that they personally made and certainly that the Conservative government made, or no illusions about that. But that can’t be the be all and end all. It’s got to be just one element of a broader group of people that come together.

And most people, the balance has to be people who are political outsiders who are going to make sure that reform remains the best vehicle to change the country, not just slipping into the old ways of the Tory party or the Labour Party.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, this has got to be one of the big challenges for reform, which is, where do you get 350, let’s say, of those people. And in some ways I totally understand, I think, Francis’ point about Nadim Zahawi. I agree with you. Very successful businessman, very smart guy, very sharp guy. But we come back to the point where he promised to not introduce vaccine passports and then two weeks later, however long it was, did. Right.

And that is exactly the Tory slippery behavior that you were describing, where people are blown by the winds of the events. Whereas, forgive me, I may be very old fashioned, I’m only in my early 40s, but I remember a time when politicians would say, well, I committed not to do something, the Prime Minister is making me do it, I resign. Right. And I don’t remember.

ROBERT JENRICK: Well, I’m not sure you do remember many of those because they’re actually incredibly rare.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Robin Cook.

ROBERT JENRICK: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Claire Shaw. Yeah, I remember them.

ROBERT JENRICK: Yeah. There are honorable examples. There aren’t that many of those people.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, if we had more of those people, we’d have prime ministers who don’t force people to do stuff they don’t want.

ROBERT JENRICK: I totally agree.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

The Power of Principled Stands

ROBERT JENRICK: And never underestimate the impact that you can make doing that. I mean, I was a relatively junior or one of the most junior members of the cabinet when I was asked essentially to pilot a bill through parliament on Rwanda that I didn’t believe in. And I said, well, I’m not prepared to do that. And it created a massive national debate on the whole policy.

And so it is powerful when you say I’m not prepared to just be another person who says one thing in private, does another thing in public. We do need more of those principled people.

I would say about Nigel that one of the qualities that he undoubtedly has is consistency on issues. That’s very true on some of the biggest issues facing the country. I mean, he’s been talking about the dangers of mass migration since I was a teenager when Tony Blair opened us up to migration at scale from EU accession countries before others. So that’s 20 or 30 years of consistent advocacy when it was an unfashionable point of view.

He was the one who’s out in the channel talking about the small boats, putting it on his own social media when there was no media interest in the issue. He was laughed at really, and people are not laughing now. And it’s become one of the biggest issues facing the country and emblematic of failure and unfairness within the country.

So he personally is somebody of conviction and consistency and that is very important in a Prime Minister. Probably the single most important quality if you wanted to serve under somebody in government is to know that they’re going to stick by you if you’re prepared to do tough things and that it’s very clear the course that is being set for the government. And so people should have faith in him and hopefully he will build as I think you can now begin to see a strong team of people around him.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Now that I agree with. Speaking of strong team, what is going to be your role in the strong team?

ROBERT JENRICK: Well, I don’t know.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Oh, come on. Come on. What you’re telling you left the Conservative Party with no promise of a job. What? Really? Come on.

ROBERT JENRICK: I’ll wash up.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Tea?

ROBERT JENRICK: Yeah, I’m honestly, what would you like to do?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What would be your preference? Would you want to have the immigration brief again and have a proper crack at it?

ROBERT JENRICK: There’s a lot. I mean, I’ve got very broad interests, to be honest. There’s lots of things I’d be open to doing. But I didn’t join the party on some kind of deal. I’ve joined because I’d come to the conclusion.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Robert, come on.

ROBERT JENRICK: No, look, come on. I’m telling you the truth, God’s honest truth, I am. I joined to help make reform stronger so that we can have a team of people and we can build serious, credible policies in the months and years ahead and there’ll be different ways I might be able to do that. Ultimately, that’s a decision for Nigel. So you have to have him on your show.

The Need for Long-Form Political Discourse

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, we’ve had him on our show many times and will again, of course. We’d love to have all the party leaders on our show. I think actually it’s really interesting hearing some of your ideas. I’d love to sit down like this with Zach Polanski and Keir Starmer and all.

I think we will get better politics when every politician who is within touching distance or in positions of leadership has to speak in this way about issues at length and you really get to know a little bit about what their thinking is, where they’re coming from, how trustworthy you perceive them, et cetera. I’d love to see that by the next election. In the same way we had a podcast election in America. We need one in the UK in my opinion. I know that’s very self serving.

ROBERT JENRICK: It works for you guys. But I think you’re right and I mean, if I’ve learned anything in the last couple of years, you do have to do politics differently to the way it was done before. And it’s been helpful to me to get out of Westminster, take up issues, try to speak directly to people, whether it’s on podcasts or through videos I’ve done on, you know, tradesmen having their tools nicked or fare dodgers on the London Underground.

People are such a low opinion, rightly, of politicians right now, that trying to find new ways of speaking to them or actually just getting stuck in and shaming the authorities into action is absolutely key.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, go ahead.

The Crisis of Democratic Legitimacy

FRANCIS FOSTER: I was going to say, because to me, Robert, we’re actually, and people may think this is hyperbole, but I don’t actually think it is. I think we’re a really dangerous place in our democracy, because think about it like this. If you’re an ordinary man or woman, you voted, let’s say, Conservative. You wanted Brexit to happen. Brexit was fudged. We had Pro Remain. You then had another fudge. It finally happened.

And then you had all these promises about restricting immigration. It didn’t happen. You then had Labour come in who said they’re going to tackle it. They haven’t. So you’re thinking to yourself, well, quite frankly, what’s the point? What are the other alternatives when it comes to government?

Because if democracy can’t deliver these things, then should we try something else? And you hear the kids, young people talk about abolishing capitalism isn’t working. And in a way, they’ve got a point. It ain’t working for them. You look, they go, democracy isn’t working. They’re right. It ain’t working for them. So this is a very dangerous moment, isn’t it?

Britain Is Broken

ROBERT JENRICK: It is. But this is my point. When people ask, is Britain broken? And there are some people, like Kemi and Starmer, who make the argument that Britain is not broken. Well, just walk the streets, talk to people, go to the pubs and the factories and the cafes and understand the lives of people in this country.

Wages have stagnated for 20 years. You’ve got 93% of crimes go unresolved. Our armed forces are small, the size they’ve been since Napoleonic times. You know, NHS waiting lists continue to be terrible. You’ve got, was it 40% now of young people, you know, one in five young people leaving university and earning less than they’ve ever gone to university in the first place. You can’t get people on the housing ladder now, you know, issue after issue after issue. Things are very bad.

And as you rightly say, people voted for change at the last general election. They didn’t have faith. Let’s be honest in Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves even then. But it was like a cry from the heart that they were so angry and frustrated with the Conservatives that anything will be better. So almost every constituency in the country was a by-election where the result, the essay question was how do I get rid of the Tories?

And that led to the worst ever election defeat where only a few people managed to survive by chance or good fortune, whatever. And then it’s been as bad, if not worse, under Labour. And all of these problems just seem to be getting worse and worse and worse.

So that is my central argument, that the next election is almost the last chance for the country. And if the public vote for change then, and they get let down once again by reform or by anybody who gets in, I think that the country’s going to go down a very, very dangerous path. Then both the country itself will continue to slip away into decline, social and economic decline, but also people’s trust in politics will just be shredded beyond repair.

And that’s why there’s such a onus on people like myself to put party loyalty to one side, get behind what you believe is the best vehicle to change the country, and I believe passionately, that is reform and make it a success so that it actually has a serious and credible plan so it doesn’t let the country down after the next general election. And that is what I’m going to dedicate every waking hour to between now and the next general election.

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Building a Credible Alternative

FRANCIS FOSTER: Because there’s going to be a lot of people going. Robert, you’re very eloquent. You’re great. Reform talk’s a good game, and I completely agree with your diagnosis, but how are we going to save the patient?

ROBERT JENRICK: Yeah, well, the first thing is reform. What Nigel has managed to do is to speak for millions of people in the country. He understands the depth of frustration and disillusionment there is and articulates that very powerfully. Coupled with that, he does have a personal record of having voiced those issues for a very long time. And he’s been talking about net zero, as is Richard Tice, well before it was fashionable to do so. And there are other examples as well, but that’s not enough.

You’ve got to then build a team of people so that we go into a general election. People think, actually this is a serious group of credible people who could actually run the country. They seem to be people who are gripped with the scale of the challenge and could get on and do the job and then have a set of plans that are comprehensive and are ready to go on day one, have legislation drafted where necessary so that you don’t waste months or years, because we all know that the first six months, the first year in office, is the only moment you’ve really got to do radical things in the country.

And, you know, whether you love or loathe Donald Trump, I think we can agree that there was a galvanizing moment when he first came to office because he did have a plan and he got stuff done in the first few weeks and months that even his critics had to acknowledge was important and was achieving things and doing what he said he was going to do. And although the issues here are very different and, you know, there’s not a direct comparison, that is what we have to do. We’ve got to be ready to go so that we can actually change the country and not make the same mistakes again.

The Coalition Challenge: Balancing Economic Visions

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, and the problems you’re facing are gigantic. And you talked about trade offs. This is really important to talk about because my worry is the worry that you’ve articulated, which is a lot of people will vote for reform at the next election. I think that’s undoubtedly clear. And you know, I don’t tell people who to vote for, but of the parties that are planning or saying they will address the key issues, as I see them, reform is the only one that’s really credibly promising to do anything about it. So that’s great.

But my big worry is you’re simultaneously trying to deal with two very. The portions of the reform coalition are very good for opposition because there’s a shared sense of anger with the political elites. And so you can say there’s the Thatcherite Faragian wing, if you like low tax, pro business, all of that great stuff. And it shares a commonality with the red wall wing, which is they’re against mass immigration and so on.

But those two parts of the party and the base don’t really agree about economic policy at all. One wants low taxes, allowing business to flourish. The other one wants a lot of redistribution and a lot of welfare. And so in my argument would be, maybe correct me on this if you disagree. So how are you going to simultaneously stimulate growth and also continue the levels of welfare spending that are just catastrophic?

You will be familiar with the statistic the Angela Merkel raised in 2011. The European, including Britain, is 12% of the world’s population, 25% GDP and 50% of welfare spending. So how are you going to appease those people and just make that work?

ROBERT JENRICK: Yes, you see, I don’t think that’s a fair analysis. Please let me explain. You know, the people that I represent in North Nottinghamshire are not wealthy people. It’s a town where thousands of people go to work every day in distribution centers, food processing factories, doing tough jobs, frankly. And my near neighbor is Lee Anderson, who represents a not dissimilar town.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Sure.

ROBERT JENRICK: And the people that reform are attracting, and we hope to attract more of in the years ahead are not people who are scrounging. They are the people who are getting up at 7 o’clock in the morning to do the school run, then go to work in the distribution.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Hold on, Robert.

ROBERT JENRICK: Hold on, hold on.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’m not saying scrounging. Hold on. More than half the country takes more in benefits than they put in taxes. Right? Half the country. I’m not saying anyone is scrounging.

ROBERT JENRICK: No, no. But I think point one is to say that reform is not a party of welfare. Reform is a party of working people, and that is what it’s going to be in the years ahead. And the types of people that I represent are the people who are most vociferous in demanding sensible reforms to the welfare system because they don’t want people to be getting the motability Mercedes in the drive and seeing that parked on the drive next to them when you know, for ADHD or ever bollocks is behind it.

And you know, they want, of course they want a safety net and they know that life can be tough and if something God forbid happens to you, if you don’t have savings, as most people don’t, you want the state to be able to have your back. But those people are not looking for reform to be creating a ballooning welfare budget. And so reform already has set out welfare reforms and it will do more in the years ahead. And I don’t think that is discordant. I think that the very people who are hardest up but who are in work and doing the right things are the people who care most about that as a matter of fundamental fairness.

Second thing I’d say is that reform will have a distinct economic policy to the Conservative Party. It feels to me as if the Conservative Party today is still reliving a fantasy of the Thatcher era and is sort of cosplaying Margaret Thatcher. And I don’t really mean that in as disparaging a manner as it sounds because like anybody else, I on the right, I admire Margaret Thatcher. And I grew up in the 80s and the 90s. And it was the radical changes that she made to the country and the fact that it arrested decline that in many respects persuaded me to become a Conservative.

But she was right for that moment. And the main lesson we should draw from Margaret Thatcher was she saw a country in decline, was willing to bring forward serious reforms, particularly supply side reforms, which are always the hardest things to do in practice rather than just reaching for the easy lever of cutting taxes or spending money. And we should try and do the same thing for our era, but there will be different solutions.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And what will they be?

Re-industrialization and Strategic Economic Policy

ROBERT JENRICK: Well, I mean, let me give you an example. If you said in the 80s or the 90s that we should consider nationalizing or part nationalizing steel, people on the right would have said absolutely not. We’re fighting, that’s exactly what we’re fighting against. If you’d asked me 15 or 20 years ago whether or not it would be sensible for the British state judiciously to take a strategic stake in a marquee business like say, Rolls Royce, if it gave them the balance sheet to be able to go do something that’s very important for the country, like build small nuclear reactors, I probably would have said that’s not a sensible thing to do because I didn’t want to see industrial policy as it had become a dirty word in the 70s, recreated.

But the economy today is different. We now face a world in which defense and security is very clearly linked to the economy. And with rising authoritarian states like China, it does not make sense for us to lose our domestic steel industry or our chemicals and fertilizer and car manufacturing to China and leave us so exposed. And so there are arguments for pursuing a degree of re-industrialization, sorry.

And we’ve also seen the fallacy of globalization, where there was a belief when I was growing up that you could just have all your manufacturing made in China or India or Indonesia or wherever it was, and the UK could still be a highly innovative economy. All the smart people would be here, manufacturing, designing things, but all of the manufacturing would happen elsewhere.

If you listen to someone like James Dyson, who was on the radio over Christmas explaining the decisions that he’s made with his business, you’d say that’s been proven to be wrong. The two do go together, at least to some degree. And if you have no manufacturing in the UK, don’t be surprised if you also don’t have the design, the engineering, the technological advance and all the jobs and the value add that comes with that. And so we need to bring as much of that back to the UK and make things there, create things, have the innovation happening here in the UK.

And so the point I’m making is that you have to move with the times and have an economic policy that suits the politics and the economics of today and that will not simply be reheating Thatcherism and the ideas that made a lot of sense to Britain in the 1980s and to some people that might seem a little discordant, that you might be setting out for very free market policies in some respects, like deregulation, trying to find ways to lower taxes, trying to make the UK as investable a proposition as possible, get some of those wealthy investors back into the country who’ve been lost as a result of changes to non doms and so on, whilst at the same time saying there are some strategic industries we want to support, there are maybe some businesses we want to even take a stake in.

We do care about regional inequality in the country because we don’t want to see towns in places like the Midlands and the north just left to lose jobs and investment as they have done now for generations, and do what Boris Johnson set out to do, but was never delivered on leveling up or regional policy, however you want to describe it. And that, I think will be different than what the Conservative Party is saying, but will be coherent. I don’t think it’s an intellectually incoherent argument. I say that we have to come with new solutions.

Energy Abundance as Economic Foundation

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The one thing you will need to do if you want to re-industrialize Britain is go from having the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world to producing lots and lots of cheap, reliable energy, which means you just have to say net zero in the bin, day one, we’re going to make energy in Britain, we’re going to produce our gas, etc. Is that the plan?

ROBERT JENRICK: Yes. Yes. So the reform’s policy, which I’ve advocated for some time as well, is the aim of British energy policy is energy abundance. Let’s go for cheap and reliable energy and we’ll do that however we can. If there’s treasure in the ground or in our seas, we should make use of it. So as much as we can get from North Sea oil and gas, let’s use it. If there is fracking that can be done in a way where there’s commercial interest and it’s safe, we should do so.

We should be honest enough to say that gas is here to stay for the foreseeable future. And yeah, there’ll also be a role for renewables like offshore wind and so on, but it won’t be massively subsidized to the detriment of other things. And we should be going for broke on small nuclear reactors. And that means completely changing the planning system. And so we tried to do what other countries have done elsewhere in the world, like South Korea here, so that we can build them as fast as possible. And that will be the bedrock of our economic policy.

Because, you know, there aren’t that many levers that government can pull to get economic growth going again. It can change the planning system so you can get the country building again. It can change our education and skills policy. And so we send less young people to university and more put through the route of genuine skills through apprenticeships. But the most important of all will be having a different energy policy.

We’ve basically just got to do everything that is necessary to lower energy prices for consumers and for energy intensive industries. And although there’s been a lot of de-industrialization, there’s still almost 2 million jobs in the country in energy intensive industries. And those jobs will be lost. I mean, they will go in the next 10 or 15 years. And they’re good jobs, mostly outside of the Southeast, which are incredibly important to communities as well as to our national interest. And we have to save those jobs.

Global Realignment and Britain’s Strategic Position

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Let me ask one question before Francis takes over again. There is one thing that’s happening right now. We saw it at Davos and we see it with the new administration. It’s not that new anymore. It’s been a year in. There is a global realignment. And in light of the critical comments that President Trump made about Europe, which personally, I thought there was some, you know, his comments about NATO troops, et cetera, I’m glad he walked those back because they were disrespectful and wrong.

But in the broad sweep of his analysis, which is Europe is committing cultural, economic and industrial suicide and is no longer a useful ally to the United States. I mean, anyone looking at things objectively has to acknowledge that there’s a very large kernel of truth in that critique. Right. And that has produced a sort of, oh, we’re so offended, we’ll go and cozy up to China response from the Marc Carneys and frankly, the Keir Starmers of the world. My view is we should be going, it’s a fair critique. We’re going to make ourselves strong again. And of course, the United States is our natural alliance to pursue with the most vigor. Is that your position at reform?

ROBERT JENRICK: It is. It is. No, I totally agree. I mean, to your opening comment. Absolutely. Trump was wrong to suggest that British troops didn’t play a decisive and incredibly dangerous role in recent conflicts. So that was offensive and wrong. I’m pleased he’s walked back those comments to an extent. But the broader critique I have a lot of sympathy with.

Has Europe made a series of catastrophic mistakes over the course of the last 30 years in terms of mass migration, its energy policy, the way it’s denigrated its history and its cultural inheritance? Yes, absolutely. Is it in a very perilous position now? I do think it is, yeah. Because mass migration is changing communities. Some European towns and cities are frankly unrecognizable from where they were 10 or 20 years ago. Some of that is irreversible. In other countries, there may be strategies that could be deployed to allow integration or a degree of it, but very difficult.

In some places, its energy policy has been so poor that it’s not just the UK that is de-industrializing, but Germany and Italy and other countries that had a much bigger industrial base within living memory. It doesn’t have the critical minerals and the energy resources that some other parts of the world have. And then it’s got obviously terrible demographics as well, where everything is going in the wrong direction.

So it does feel that Europe is in a moment of peril. We should wake up to that and do something about it. And I think we have the analysis of what needs to be done. We just got to get on and do it. I don’t think you go and cozy up to China or authoritarian states. I mean, there’s an argument to do some business with them. Of course, you know, that doesn’t mean allowing Chinese embassies to be created or giving away the Chagos Islands or allowing our universities to be bought out by Chinese interests.

It feels like Starmer is making exactly the same mistake that the Cameron Osborne government did back in the 2010s in believing that in the short term pursuit of economic growth, you can go to China and secure investment. Except it’s a worse mistake to make now because at least back then, maybe it was naive, but at least back then, some people felt that openness would lead in the long run to political change in China. Now we can see that isn’t going to happen, or at least not in the foreseeable future. And so it’s a particularly naive thing to do now to go and sell yourself out to China.

And I also don’t think that’s really what China responds to. I mean, China, like most authoritarian states, does respond to strength as well. So prostrating yourself in front of Xi Jinping is unlikely to lead to the kind of dividend that Keir Starmer is hoping for.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Robert, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Final question is always the same. What’s the one thing we’re not talking about as a society that we really should be?

Final Questions and Nuclear Deterrent Concerns

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Before Robert answers the final question at the end of the interview, make sure you go to triggerpod.co.uk where you get to see him answer your questions. What do you think you could do differently with Reform that you don’t think would work in the Conservatives? How would you deal with the blob? And how much could you reduce the civil service personnel by?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Should right wing parties be doing more to speak about the dangers of the far left? Why do you think the far left are not spoken about? What do you think you bring to Reform that you think is missing from the party?

ROBERT JENRICK: Well, one of the things that I’ve been reading about a lot recently, to the extent that you can, is the state of our nuclear deterrent. And there’s been a few whistleblowers, there’s been some commentary online and a couple of news stories, but I’m amazed that Parliament is not talking about this.

It feels that our nuclear deterrent, which is so integral to our security, is in a terrible state right now. Programs to improve it are massively over budget, massively delayed. You’ve got very brave people who are out at sea in submarines on very, very long, extended missions, and there’s a genuine risk that it doesn’t work at all.

Yet no one is prepared to talk about this in Parliament. Now, of course, there are some things I’m not expecting, that all of our top secrets are laid bare in the House of Commons. Although somebody did once say to me that the best place to tell a secret is in the House of Commons. But it feels like this is exactly the sort of example, something where trivia is debated in Parliament, but something that’s incredibly important and is at the bedrock of our national security and subject to billions of pounds of our defence budget, is barely spoken about at all.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Robert, thanks for coming on. We’re going to head over to Substack, where our supporters get to ask you their questions, so head on over there now at triggerpod.co.uk. You were immigration Minister when the use of hotels for asylum seekers exploded. Do you accept responsibility? Did you push back against it at the time or did you go along with it? What would you do differently going forward?

ROBERT JENRICK: Sam?

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