secretsqirrel
Senior Member
Are they going to replace it with the Discrimination Act?
Reform, and the death of the Tory Party
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Are they going to replace it with the Discrimination Act?
CXRAndy
Epic Member
OP
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briantrumpet
Pharaoh
I think Lee Anderson is calling Nigel Farage a 'thicko' here. And yes, it's a genuine tweet. And yes, Lee Anderson was right about something.
icowden
Shaman
This just in... a moving profile of Robert Jenrick, by Henry Morris (if you haven't subscribed yet, why not?)
Jenrick Among the Folding Tables
A New Yorker profile
To understand the British car boot sale, we must first abandon the idea that commerce should aspire to dignity. A sociological phenomenon, it is, according to Max Weber, “what happens when a nation mistrustful of enthusiasm agrees to meet in a damp field at dawn.”
And it is in such a setting, amid long lines of headlights cutting through the Hertfordshire mist, then reversing into neat rows reminiscent of aircraft being prepared for decommissioning, that I have agreed to meet Robert Jenrick for the first time.
Like the wares by which we are surrounded – a strimmer that once knew a shed, a Cheers! VHS that survived a Christmas tree lights fire, some Hungry Hippos that entertained three siblings – Jenrick arrives with a story he no longer owns. He is constantly evolving, and a whole month has passed since Kemi Badenoch expedited his defection to Reform.
Meeting him at an event designed to launder the past feels apt. His passage from soft-edged Remainer in 2016 to no-nonsense Reformer in 2026 is best understood not as a conversion, but a recalibration. His latest iteration, as a working-class hero preoccupied by fare-dodgers, grooming gangs and car boot sale fences, bears all the hallmarks of a man who has asked Chat GPT “What do blokes who think Soccer AM has been rubbish since Tim Lovejoy and Helen Chamberlain left, care about?” and then given the answers to a hungry branding start-up.
Born on 9th of January 1982, Jenrick was raised in Shropshire and educated at Wolverhampton Grammar School. His personality, best described as innocent of charisma, was refined at St John’s College Cambridge and imbued by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government with the kind of transatlantic confidence that comes naturally to people who call a spade a shovel.
Then, shortly before he went to war with activist judges, Jenrick trained as a lawyer. For a time, he worked at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, a firm with more partners than he had principles. In 2014, he entered Parliament via a by-election in Newark. By 2019 he was Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government where his tenure was overshadowed by the Westferry Printworks planning controversy, an episode which involved the pornographer Richard Desmond, a £1b development, and a brown envelope.
After losing to Kemi Badenoch in the Conservative leadership race Jenrick sashayed nimbly into the fertile political environment of social media content creation where he belatedly remembered all sorts of issues he’s always cared about.
As a former Cabinet minister, former rising star and man of the future, Jenrick has always been provisional. Like a forty-year-old prefabricated classroom outside a crumbling school or the temporary traffic lights that have reduced an arterial road to a single lane since 1993, he is the interim solution that has lingered.
Thus, when Badenoch ejected him from the Conservative party before he could defect, he responded with the weary composure of someone who already knew his bluff had been called.
On the day we meet he has just been named as the treasury spokesman for Reform (think UK MAGA, more Monty Python, less NRA). Dressed in M&S jeans and a quilted gilet, Jenrick has the air of a man who just interrupted a meeting with himself. In kind, he greets me reproachfully, as if I am an unruly dog, or a meddlesome planning officer.
“Welcome, to the British carnival of criminality” he says, staccato.
I look around. Skid Row this is not. Unsure how to react, I pick up a commemorative Prince Andrew and Fergie cruet from a Skoda trunk full of royal memorabilia.
“That’s charming” says Jenrick, who after an aide has stood on his pristine Adidas Gazelles to remind him that the stars of It’s A Royal Knockout 1982 are now politically toxic, adds “but probably hot.”
“By which I mean, Prince Andrew’s continued association with a paedophile financier is an affront to common decency” clarifies the man who helped the proprietor of Barely Legal mag swerve a £45m community infrastructure levy.
An overweight Polish man selling rasta-themed smoking paraphernalia from the back of an Overfinch spots Jenrick’s Reform rosette and interrupts us. “Yeah, the boys. No more Halal! Farage is gonna fark things up.” He offers Jenrick a fist bump.
Jenrick, who I am quickly learning is unfamiliar with most forms of social interaction, briefly grasps the man’s fist, nods without making eye contact, and scuttles away. I follow.
He stops beside an elderly couple’s SsangYong and browses a 1980s Mr Frosty ice crunchy maker. I ask: “What do you think about your leader Nigel Farage’s claim that it was the Tories who broke Britain?” Jenrick stares bleakly at the fluorescent plastic lever that produces a dribble of slush reminiscent of a mismanaged public project.
“Let’s talk about stolen goods” he replies. “This place is a parable of lawless Britain. Many of the tools being sold here still have the workmen’s names etched in them.” He thrusts his hand between a porcelain scotty dog and a 2007 written-in Buffy The Vampire Slayer Filofax, to retrieve a cordless drill. “Look, this one was owned by a pair of men called Black and Decker.”
“That’s the brand, you daft apeth” says the lady.
“At every car boot I go to, nobody can explain where the goods come from.”
“You what Sonny Jim? We got given this by our daughter-in-law three Christmases ago.”
“Four” interjects her husband.
“Or how they come to be so cheap” continues Jenrick.
“It’s £30 because Colin’s already got a Mikita. She never paid any attention did Charlene. I think that’s why Jeff left her.”
“She left Jeff” corrects Colin.
“Colin, don’t be so silly. Who in their right mind would leave Jeff?”
“Charlene” explains Colin to us.
Jenrick is lost. Incapable of communicating with the very people to whom he has been rebranded to appeal, the man who gratefully took £25,000 from a sanctioned oligarch appears unable to think quickly, laterally or creatively when required.
“You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to work out this was stolen” he finishes flatly, daring us to believe he cares.
“It’s not stolen. I’ve never heard anything like it in all my born days. Colin, have you heard this? Now if you’re not buying it, put it back.”
Jenrick replaces the drill. We approach a Vauxhall Cavalier containing a selection of three-foot-high fibreglass Native Americans and their one-armed vendor.
“Stolen” says Jenrick, matter-of-factly.
“Like their ancestral home?” fires back the seller of the offensive caricatures, wrongfooting all of us.
Jenrick attempts to change the subject. “How much for Danny Baker’s Own Goals and Gaffes VHS?” he mumbles.
The qualities which for years marked out Jenrick as an exemplary moderate Conservative — modern, managerial, full of pre-moulded convictions — are at odds with Reform’s raison d’être. Nigel Farage does politics by friction. He enjoys simplicity, confrontation, and the kinds of noise that ideas make when they collide with people, and each other. Jenrick’s ‘elevation’ to treasury spokesman, on the other hand, feels less like a coronation than a product recall.
Watching him navigate the aisles, it becomes clear that what he lacks in ideological ballast he makes up for in portability. Reform is less a party than a mood board — a laminated collage of grievances into which Jenrick inserts himself with the assurance of someone who knows there will always be another stall to move on to.
There is, of course, something peculiarly British about the whole arrangement. The suspicion of polish. The romance of the second-hand. The belief that value resides not in provenance but in price. The car boot is like that too.
As we part, Jenrick shakes my hand in the preoccupied manner of a man already rehearsing a clip about Travellers for TikTok. Somewhere nearby a child haggles ferociously over a box of Zomblings. A woman loudly insists a fondue set is “vintage Habitat.” The boot sale, I reflect, as I head back to Gatwick with a Smurfs jigsaw short of three pieces under my arm, is what Stirner might have conceived as a rehearsal for national life. Everything is slightly damp. Nothing is quite as described, nobody trusts anyone, yet they persist because what else is left?
Jenrick understands this better than most. He knows that in Britain you no longer need to manufacture belief — you need to price it competitively.
icowden
Shaman
Unfortunately that isn't the case. Reform was taken back into private ownership in Feb2025. It's now Reform Ltd and is also a political party.
The company is a non profit managed by the guarantors, Nigel Farage and Zia Yusuf the multimillionaire.
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briantrumpet
Pharaoh
Keeps him away from the day job at Clacton, I guess.
secretsqirrel
Senior Member
He was on an aid mission, to help 4 guys build a house or something. I know because I read it on the front page of the Telecrap this morning.
Pblakeney
Legendary Member
secretsqirrel
Senior Member
Let’s face it, he’s no Greta Thunberg.
Pinno718
Guru
Beebo
Guru
Are we expected to believe that Farage gives a shoot about 4 blokes in Chagos?
BoldonLad
Old man on a bike. Not a member of a clique.
- Location
- South Tyneside
or, even four blokes in Clacton 😂
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briantrumpet
Pharaoh
I wonder which specific design he chose.
