As a child, one of my fondest memories is of my father taking me to Portsmouth. We went there for three reasons: HMS Victory, HMS Mary Rose and HMS Warrior.
This was back in the day before the progressives took over our institutions and tried to punish anyone who was interested in the heroes of Britain’s patriarchal, racist, heteronormative past in which we instigated every bad and crushed everything good, all in the name of profit or white supremacy or masculinity or nationalism, depending on which element of progressive ideology you prioritise. Like Aldous Huxley’s John, adopting an ascetic lifestyle to purify himself of the brave new world — only for his bizarre behaviour to further the distance between him and the world he, increasingly unwillingly, inhabits — I keep an engraving of Nelson’s death hanging in my hallway as a pathetic act of resistance.
Of these three ships, undoubtedly the least famous is Warrior. Launched in 1860, the 40-gun steam-powered armoured frigate was the world’s first iron-hulled warship, a powerful statement of British naval supremacy.
Warrior’s impact was tremendous, but more as a signal for things to come than her actual service record. The Royal Navy’s transition from sail to steam — and from wood to iron — was a painful one that spanned over five decades. Ten years before she was commissioned, the RN had just 71 steam powered ships, just 25 per cent of the fleet; by ten years after, 65 per cent of the fleet was steam, including 58 ironclads. It was not until the 1890s that frontline warships were entirely shorn of masts. For all her significance, Warrior’s active life was relatively short. After just 15 years, she was placed in reserve, rendered obsolete by the mastless and turreted Devastation class.
There is a lesson, in this tangled morass of naval analogy, for Robert Jenrick.
When Warrior launched, she didn’t immediately replace the wooden sailing ship but rendered them obsolete by the very fact of her presence. Could it be that Rob Jenrick, even after failing to become Leader of the Opposition, is doing the same to his former rivals?
Since the election, Jenrick has been the most effective campaigner on the Tory benches — and not by a matter of inches, but miles. Taking on the brief of Shadow Justice Secretary, his delivery has been unapologetically punchy, a style he mastered during the last leadership election which almost bought him victory. Alongside his manner, some of the themes have rolled over, too — most notably the ECHR and its role in preventing the deportation of violent foreign criminals from our shores.
Jenrick’s style of delivery is unusually robust and unapologetically so
But he is not just rehashing his leadership campaign. Jenrick has used his position to ruthlessly hammer opposition, both democratic and bureaucratic. Whilst opposition can be a thankless task, Jenrick can actually point to successes, too. He was amongst the loudest voices in responding to the two-tier justice issue — attacking first Labour and, after they issued guidance that would have allowed lesser penalties on grounds of ethnicity, the Sentencing Council.
Despite Labour having a half-decent defence line — that whilst in government, Tories had supported a draft version — Jenrick simply crashed through it, combining daring aggression worthy of Victory with an iron-clad hide worthy of Warrior. Arguing that the measures would turn judges “against straight white men”, he added the eye-catching weapon of Led by Donkeys-style guerrilla projections to the energetic output of strongly worded op-eds, unapologetically straight TV appearances and high-quality videos he has become known for. It is questionable whether the Sentencing Council’s U-turn would have been achieved without him in place.
In the storm over grooming gangs, too — ignited, amongst other things, by Sam Bidwell’s response to Fraser Nelson in The Critic — Jenrick was at the front. In an anonymous article for these most august pages, a “Senior Source” pointed out that during re-lighting of the rape gangs discourse, they had to wait days before a “milquetoast” statement calling for an inquiry. “Thank God for Rob Jenrick,” they wrote. “Otherwise the average person would think Rupert Lowe was the leader of the opposition.”
Some of Jenrick’s success is easily discerned and easily replicable: intensity of effort, combined with media mastery. Although not quite matching the coverage achieved during his campaign peak (it would be hard to imagine anyone sustaining such levels long-term), he is still a consistent feature of the airwaves and in print, his output far exceeding any other member of the shadow cabinet — perhaps even combined. But there is another element. Jenrick’s style of delivery is unusually robust and unapologetically so. There is little hand-wringing and certainly no backing down. Perhaps this is what first drew this Yorkshireman to him; in the finest style of Harry Enfield, he says what he likes, and he likes what he says.
As with Warrior, Jenrick has developed in opposition into a new threat. Warrior was built in response to the 1859 launching of the French Gloire, the first ocean-going ironclad warship. Jenrick has come to the fore in response to the rise of Reform. But the Gloire was wooden-hulled; likewise, Jenrick has regularly shown Farage to be obsolete by flanking him to the right — particularly on immigration, which should be Reform’s bread and butter.
Aris Roussinos has noted that “both Badenoch and Farage are competing over 2010s conservatism, whilst Jenrick has seized the battleground of the 2020s”. Jenrick is fighting the battles of the future, focussed as much on bureaucratic opposition as democratic, combining consummate professionalism with relentless focus on the issues that will define us in the future: immigration, the consequences of multiculturalism, the entrenchment of progressive ideology within our institutions. His increased reach is a consequence of his cut-through on issues that are growing increasingly important to the electorate; he is rendering his opposition obsolete, even if they still float around for a while.
