Kemi cosies up to her Tory leadership rival – what can she be thinking?

The new Conservative leader has hugged her erstwhile enemy Robert Jenrick uncomfortably close, despite their major disagreements – cue drama, dissent and distraction, writes John Rentoul

One of the funniest lines in the comic subplot that was the Conservative leadership contest was the “yellow card” system: a rule announced by Bob Blackman, the chair of the 1922 Committee, which ran the MPs’ stage of the ballot, to deter personal attacks.

Blackman said: “The constant backfighting and attacking was one of the contributing reasons why the party did so badly at the general election. We are determined we will not tolerate that.”

In the end, no yellow cards were issued – not even when Kemi Badenoch brought her opponent down with a cynical professional foul in the dying moments of the contest. She said, in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph the weekend before the close of voting: “With me you’d have a leader where there’s no scandal. I was never sacked for anything, I didn’t have to resign in disgrace or, you know, because there was a whiff of impropriety.”

That was a pointed reference to Robert Jenrick’s departure from the cabinet in 2021, after he unlawfully approved a Canary Wharf development by Richard Desmond. I thought then that there was no prospect of Jenrick serving in Badenoch’s shadow cabinet.

But there was a more fundamental obstacle to Jenrick’s membership of her shadow cabinet, which was his absolute opposition to Britain’s membership of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). I did not see how this could be made to fit with Badenoch’s more pragmatic approach. (Her line is that she is prepared to leave the ECHR “if necessary”, and she has even said that Britain would “probably” have to leave if she were to form a government, but she has kept her options open.)

Jenrick says that the small boats cannot be stopped unless Britain has a deterrent such as the Rwanda scheme, which he thinks the ECHR would prevent. Badenoch says the issue is more complicated, and that withdrawing from the court is not a magic solution.

It might be possible to gloss over such a fundamental difference of opinion if Jenrick had been appointed shadow transport secretary, say. But no, it was reported that he had accepted Badenoch’s offer to serve as shadow justice secretary – a post with direct responsibility for policy on the ECHR.

The way his appointment became public confirmed the friction between him and the new Conservative leader. Her office confirmed on Monday the two big shadow cabinet posts – Mel Stride as shadow chancellor and Priti Patel as shadow foreign secretary – but she wanted to announce Jenrick’s appointment as a surprise when she announced the whole shadow cabinet on Tuesday. It seems that one of Jenrick’s supporters leaked the news a day early – thus stealing headlines that would otherwise have focused on the “safe” appointment of Stride to the second most important opposition post.

When the rest of the shadow cabinet was announced, just before its first meeting on Tuesday morning, one of the other more striking appointments was that of Jesse Norman, the intellectual One Nation Conservative, as shadow leader of the Commons. Norman, one of Badenoch’s early backers, also ought to have been shown a yellow card for his tweet about Jenrick’s party conference speech: “I am very sorry to have to say it, but that speech of Robert Jenrick’s was lazy, mendacious, simplistic tripe.”

Norman is one of many Tory MPs, possibly a majority of a reduced parliamentary party, who would have nothing to do with renouncing the ECHR. It is hard to see how this is going to end well for the opposition.

Party unity is important, but there are limits to how credibly united Badenoch and Jenrick can be after what they have said about each other. By including him in her shadow cabinet, Badenoch has guaranteed endless stories of conflict and dissent for the foreseeable future.

She has been leader of the party for three days and already her enemies in the party are complaining to journalists that she has packed the shadow cabinet with her supporters – “It’s like Liz Truss all over again,” one anonymous source has been quoted as saying.

We knew Badenoch would get the Tories noticed, which is often hard for the opposition facing a new government, but she may be getting them noticed for the wrong things.