Jenrick is an idiot sandwich

The problem with Robert Jenrick is not that he is venal, although he is. It is that he is banal. There’s something stupefying about him, a unique recipe of tone, manner and predictability. For all the faults of populism, it is not usually so boring. And yet he has somehow made it so. He has managed - it’s a feat in a way - to combine the manner of a technocrat with the aims of a demagogue.

He is not just boring because he has a boring face, although he does have an incredibly boring face. It looks like it was mass-moulded and used as a prosthetic. He is not boring because he has a boring voice, although he does have an incredibly boring voice. It’s like listening to an old engine finally succumb to age. He is not boring because of his language or his ideas or his manner, although these are also all incredibly boring. He is boring because it is always so obvious what he is doing.

At any given moment you could ask yourself: What’s the most cynical, self-interested, irresponsible and yet also incredibly basic thing you could do now, and that’s precisely what he’ll do - whether it’s making anti-immigration videos or joining Reform. And yet, despite the obviousness of the action itself, he will always pursue it with this look of deep seriousness, as if he were Napoleon devising the Italian campaign.

This week Jenrick did his thing. A situation arose, it asked questions of him, and his answers were, of course, shit. But perhaps for the first time, he did us a service. He laid out what populism is in really very clear terms. And he allowed us to compare it, meaningfully and in a fair fight, with the vastly-improved politics coming out of Downing Street.

Andy Burnham’s social care announcement this week was the best thing I have seen from a British prime minister in a very long time. It was a complete vindication of those who wanted him in No.10 and their reasoning.

He came out, announced a shortening of the Casey review, put social care at the heart of his agenda, and petitioned the country to have a big expansive debate about it - not just on cost but also on provision and its absence.

As he spoke, you got this weird memory - distantly familiar but exotic. It was political leadership. This is what it looks like, what it sounds like. Burnham had found an issue he wanted to fix - a tough one, which most thought impossible - and he was going to try to get it done. He was not just going to lead a government machine to push it through. It was much bigger than that. He was going to talk about it in a way that might bring people with him.

This requires a unique bundle of talents, including those which rarely go together. Burnham spoke emotionally about his father, who has Alzheimer’s, and the failures of the system. You can tell while watching him that this ability to be emotionally present is the most important quality he has and that, without it, politicians are lost. But he also operated with old-school professionalism of the type we haven’t seen in decades.

He was pitch rolling. Some critics attacked him for not having a policy. It has been so long since they saw professional politics being conducted that they’d forgotten what it looked like. He was behaving consciously - laying the ground for when the policy emerges, trying to get public opinion into the most favourable place for it to land, aiming the shot not at where the target is but where it will be.

This is something we once saw a lot but now rarely do, because politicians - particularly on the left - lost faith in their ability to lead public opinion or convince people of an issue. Burnham aimed his criticism at politicians, who had failed to grasp the nettle, and the media, who had failed to provide a meaningful debate.

“I do ask colleagues in the media again, can we not let the country look at this in a quite clear-eyed way, without all of the hype and the overwriting of some of these issues? I just ask it again, on this issue please can we have a factual debate… I think the public will give us their view, they’ll make it really clear what they feel they can accept and what they can’t, but we won’t get to that point if there’s all of this stuff swirling around and everyone’s frightened about everything.”

The media response was actually pretty good. TV broadcasts about the speech were often accompanied by packages with people’s stories about the care system. You know these stories. If you haven’t been through it yourself, someone you know will have: a parent within dementia, the minutiae of what it takes to sell the house to pay for care, the uniquely horrible combination of emotional trauma and admin.

Of course, it’s easier for people to be supportive when they can imagine the positive outcome - security about old age, property passed on to your kids - but have not yet been presented with the downside, which is inevitably going to be some form of taxation. Any really ambitious plans for social care, Burnham said, “will require difficult decisions”. This is code for tax. “But we will be honest with people about those. We will put them before the country at the right time, and we will hopefully proceed with people’s consent.”

You get a pretty decent picture of where we’re going with this. Hold cross-party talks, bring as many parties as you can with you, see what the review publishes, have a big fact-based national debate, then come to a decision and promise to implement after the next election. This would allow any tax rise to be explicitly accepted by voters and outside of the existing manifesto headlock.

It’s not impossible to show political leadership. You can tell the story of policy choices through the much more emotional narrative of individual lives. You can bring the public into a debate and have that debate conducted in an adult way. And when we do it through one policy area, we naturally find ourselves doing it for another one, because none of them exist in isolation.

Discussing social care, for instance, naturally led to a better discussion of immigration. “Many people from other countries have been caring for my dad,” Burnham said. “I want those carers to know: we appreciate you. We appreciate what you are doing to support people here and that really matters that I say that.”

I can’t remember the last politician who praised a group of immigrants without caveat. I think it might have been Boris Johnson after he came out of the hospital from covid. It was a relief and I felt moved. But this followed logically from the discussion of social care. Reason in one part of the policy portfolio can infect the others, like petri dishes left too close in the lab.

Just warm words? Possibly. It is hard to square with the fact that he kept Shabana Mahmood as home secretary. And yet there is a policy implication. It is hard to imagine her leave-to-remain proposals, which would put anyone on mid-skill standards of RQF Level 6 on a 15 year pathway, surviving in their current form if he is really serious about social care.

This was anti-populism. Burnham was acknowledging trade-offs. He was suggesting that we wanted two good things - low taxes and good social care - and effectively saying that we could not have both and would have to find some compromise between them. He was trying to build a public debate which could handle that kind of adult conversation. And he was attempting to do so by throwing everything he could at it: a realistic but ambitious timetable, his emotional intelligence, his political capital.

Perhaps it will all fall apart. But imagine if he succeeds. Imagine what it will demonstrate. Yes, it would help solve the social care problem, which makes a misery of later life and has severe knock-on consequences for the NHS. But just as importantly, by grappling with and solving this issue, which has been a seeping wound on British politics for so long, he would demonstrate the core promise of liberal democracy: That it can solve problems. It can design and deliver practical solutions. It can improve lives.

Starmer talked this talk, with decent speeches, early in his tenure, about populist “snake oil”. But he did not walk the walk. He refused to engage in trade offs and in the end mostly denied they existed. He did not solve problems and so he allowed populism to thrive, eventually adopting its own language and thought process to undermine his leadership.

Jenrick’s response for Reform came on Thursday. He rolled out the classic populist handbook. Once upon a time it would have seemed perfectly normal. Now it seemed unremittingly dark, a remonstrance against the whole notion of hope. An empty coastal cave as the tide rose.

There were three prongs to his attack. First, he invented an imaginary policy and then attacked Burnham for it. Next, he tried as hard as he could to sabotage any chance of an adult conversation. And finally, he engaged in the most extreme form of scare-mongering available to him.

The plan he invented involved a ten per cent levy on all estates when people die to pay for a new care service. Burnham did once propose this, although it was 16 years ago - Jenrick was still searching around constituencies to try to get into parliament as a centrist Conservative at the time. That seems terribly long ago, but time only applies to other people.

Next he raised the implication of that policy. Jenrick imagined a nurse in Makerfield who had a house worth £200,000 and a pension worth £100,000 - her children would pay £30,000 when she died.

This was his way of providing a flat rejection of Burnham’s appeal to facts and fairness, a careful debate in which people held two thoughts in their head at one time. It is perilous for Reform to allow people that degree of complexity in their thoughts, because once they have it they will notice how simplistic and ineffective the party’s own policies are. So instead you just come up with the scariest number possible, ignore what it is meant to achieve, ignore the downsides of not spending it, and try to spread it like wildfire.

Finally, he dove right into the scare-mongering. “Imagine the scene,” he said, like some kind of coin-operated cryptkeeper in an old EC comic. “A loved one – a parent or a grandparent – has passed away. You’re grieving. At the same time, you’re trying to sort out all the things that follow a death. Going through belongings. The paperwork. Then. A knock on the door. Not from a well-wisher but HMRC. ‘Hello. We’ve come to value your relative’s estate’.”

Obviously the notion that HMRC would have the desire or more importantly the resources to personally visit everyone they assess is ludicrous. But he didn’t let that get in his way. Instead, he got lost in his tale of horror and woe. “Everything goes in. The family heirlooms. Your mother’s wedding ring. If you’ve got a watch to hand on and nothing else, it’s taxed. A couple of pieces of jewellery, taxed. Even clothes - taxed.” The man’s a madman. On and on he went, fear fear fear - nothing more. No rationality, no logic, no caveats, no alternative proposals. Just stoking the anxiety, reaching into those deepest recesses of the human brain, where the paranoia and the jealousies live, where they churn away at three in the morning, and encouraging it to take over the whole.

“An official standing in your late mother’s bedroom with a clipboard. Pricing up her engagement ring. Totting up her coats. Itemising an entire life – a life of work, of thrift, of love – so that the Treasury can take its cut.”

Just a preposterous little man, with a brain so limited, in moral and cognitive terms, that it can do nothing but churn out the same tired bullshit over and over again.

Things are rarely so clear-cut. We now seem to be gearing towards a straight up-and-down fight between populism and liberal democracy. None of the weird filters and proxy battles of previous years - Brexit, Putin, Covid, or Starmer’s half-arsed paint-ourselves-like-Reform strategy. This is about as clean a clash as you can imagine.

On the one hand: properly executed, broad-based, emotionally intelligent policy making intended to solve a problem, treating the public like adults. On the other: Fear-mongering, with no rational critique or alternate proposal, encouraging the public’s most jittery and hateful instincts.

This time though, it’s a fair fight. Over the last ten years, populism’s advocates have been far better at communication than their opponents. Experts in trade or epidemiology would go on TV and explain the evidence base with all the hesitancy of those who work in academia, only to have a smiling know-nothing shit-stirrer go on and wave it all away, countering with emotion what they presented empirically.

Mainstream party leaders, from Theresa May to Starmer, lacked any confidence in their own leadership. They did not dare to challenge public opinion, they had no sense that they might guide it in any way. Their own faces seem to betray them. May’s eyes would look startled by her own words as they were uttered, as if her mind was in a perpetual state of panic about what her mouth was doing. Starmer just looked desperate for it all to be over, so he could retreat into the safety of his office.

Now the roles are reversed. It is the populists who are having a breakdown in communication. Farage is unable to contain his anger as he faces weekly allegations about corruption. Jenrick doesn’t have it in him and nor does Richard Tice. Suddenly, it is mainstream retail-offer politics which has the strongest and most accomplished advocate.

The most dangerous thing for Reform is if the national conversation settles on problems and their solutions. That is their Kryptonite.

Burnham is addressing the greatest weakness of the mainstream system - that it has stopped delivering for people, it has stopped fixing the things that are ruining their lives. Once people believe that it might improve things, the focus naturally changes to whether populists have any solutions of their own. And that is a deadly place for them to be. It is where they are utterly exposed.

This isn’t just about social care. It’s about whether liberal democracy can provide the goods. We thought we were witnessing this final battle in 2024, when Starmer won. Instead, he got a convictionless muddle, neutralised by the weakness of its own strategy. But now, after two years, we are in the unusual position of getting a second chance. Thank god for that. And thank god that, so far at least, it is being delivered capably.

Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

My column for the i paper this week was on Farage as he drifts into something that looks really quite a bit like obscurity. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

No Origin Story this week, but I did Sky News Wednesday night. There was an unfortunate incident where my fellow guest - former Conservative special adviser Salma Shah, who is brilliant by the way, in an old-school Cameronite Tory way - got her super heroes wrong. At that point I heard noises come out my mouth and watched as I accidentally revealed the indignant nerdery that lies at the core of my personality. A friend messaged me afterwards: “You’ve let your normie mask slip.”

Tickets are still available for the next Origin Story Live - you can buy them here. You get a sense of what these events are like in this cute little video where we get roasted by a member of our audience.

I’m late to this - about half a decade late - but I’ve started watching Ted Lasso and it’s a delight. In the first season at least, there’s none of the long, overly-drawn out writing that makes you wonder if you’re wasting your time, or the mediocre churn that emerges when American shows become so profitable that they have to run and run. Each short episode feels like a movie, with a beginning, a middle and an end, providing a really satisfying emotional experience. Most of all, it is a pleasure to watch someone succeed by being nice, rather than by being a vicious snarling cunt. Very against the spirit of the times.

Right, that’s your lot. Fuck off. Oh and have a pleasant weekend.