Jenrick or Badenoch: Who is more likely to ‘do a Starmer’ and return to the centre?

With James Cleverly out of the race, the two remaining prospects have a reputation for pandering to the fringes, writes John Rentoul. But is it all an act?

Robert Jenrick has denied that he plans to revert to the centre if he wins the Conservative leadership. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? That is exactly what you would expect a secret centrist to say.

It is, after all, the standard model of politics: you play to the prejudices of the “selectorate” to win the party leadership – and then you tack to the more moderate views of the wider electorate to win the general election.

In America, where most primary elections are restricted to registered supporters of a party, presidential candidates are almost bound by the constitution to say one thing to win their party’s nomination and another to win the White House. Most of the skill of politics is not making that switch seem too obvious or hypocritical.

It is the same here. Neil Kinnock won the Labour leadership from the left, on a programme of nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from Europe that he ditched as leader.

David Cameron won the Tory leadership on a promise to pull out of the main centre-right grouping in the European parliament. It was a pledge that was too Eurosceptic for his Eurosceptic opponent, David Davis. In fact, Cameron kept that promise, still having to keep his anti-EU faction at bay when he was prime minister, although in most other respects he was a moderate, one-nation Tory, in favour of gay marriage, greenery and foreign aid.

The copybook example of the tactic, though, was Keir Starmer’s election as Labour leader as a soft non-factional Corbynite, and his dizzying transformation into a ruthless and unforgiving Blairite by the time of the general election four years later.

No wonder an anonymous Labour aide has been quoted suggesting that Jenrick could be “the Tories’ Starmer”. We just do not know if that was intended as a compliment or an insult.

I have heard suggestions that Jenrick secured the votes of some Conservative MPs by assuring them that he would turn to the centre if he wins. I don’t know if the contents of any such conversations have actually been relayed to third parties, or if people are just guessing.

But if they are guessing, it is a reasonable guess. Anyone who becomes the leader of one of the main parties is likely to seek the support of the median voter in a general election, and the median voter’s preoccupations tend to be rather different from those of party members.

It is a particularly reasonable guess in the case of Jenrick, a paleo-centrist who has reinvented himself – in the last 24 months – as an anti-immigration hardliner. He voted Remain in 2016, and was one of the three mid-ranking technocratic ministers who backed Boris Johnson for the leadership in 2019 (the others being Rishi Sunak and Oliver Dowden).

He claims to have been radicalised by his experience as immigration minister in Suella Braverman’s Home Office, and he may well have been, but most of his career has been spent in the Tory mainstream.

Hence there seems to be an element of protesting too much about his “come what may” policy of withdrawing from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) – a policy, he said on Thursday, to which he would require all shadow cabinet members and all parliamentary candidates to adhere.

On this, he might have overdone the pitch to party members – that small, unrepresentative slice of the British population that will decide between him and Kemi Badenoch, with the result to be announced on 2 November. They might prefer Badenoch, a more authentic right-winger, who promises only to leave the ECHR “if necessary”. Jenrick’s policy is a guarantee of civil war in the party, and certainly among Tory MPs, as he would find it hard to fill all 23 shadow cabinet places with able people who take his absolutist line on the ECHR.

Of course, Jenrick’s denial of his intention to make a dash for the centre if he won included a large dollop of obfuscation about the terms “left”, “right” and “centre”. He aimed, he said, to fight the next general election on the “common ground” – a Thatcher-era evasive phrase.

And he is right that there is a lot of sloppy thinking about the centre ground. As Cameron discovered on the issue of Europe, the centre of British politics turned out not to be where he thought it was. With 52 per cent voting to leave, a true centrist would have been a reluctant Brexiteer.

My view is that whoever wins the Tory leadership will head towards the middling sort of voter. Badenoch would be better able to do this, because she seems true to herself, whereas Jenrick comes across as a typical politician who says what he needs to say to get elected.

And Badenoch has already shown that she is a pragmatic right-winger: as a minister, she resisted pressure from the headbanging Eurosceptics to scrap all EU-based law, and prioritised instead.

She has said some pretty silly stuff about Sunak talking right and governing left, and failing to overthrow the Blair-Brown imperium. But then, that is what you would expect a crypto-Blairite to say, isn’t it?