Robert Jenrick: From centrist Cameron Remainer to anti-immigration zealot - and now Reform

In an interview with Sky News during last autumn's Conservative conference, Robert Jenrick appeared to leave the door open to a Tory deal with Reform UK.

He was asked by deputy political editor Sam Coates: "You'd never support a pact?"

And he infuriated Tory loyalists by replying: "That is not our priority. That's not a priority."

Politics latest: Robert Jenrick sacked from shadow cabinet

In a 2024 interview with Sky News political editor Beth Rigby, he said he would have "no problem" with Mr Farage being a member of the Conservative Party.

No wonder, then, that he has now joined forces with Mr Farage after Kemi Badenoch delivered a political bombshell earlier today by sacking him.

Until he challenged Mrs Badenoch for the Conservative leadership in 2024, Mr Jenrick was perhaps best known as the minister who unlawfully intervened in a planning decision involving publisher Richard Desmond.

As immigration minister, he ordered murals of Mickey Mouse and other cartoon characters designed to welcome child asylum seekers to a reception centre in Dover to be painted over.

After Mrs Badenoch became leader and appointed him to the key post of shadow justice secretary, he never hid his ambition to undermine her and ultimately oust her.

He also continued to court headlines and controversy in equal measure, never more so than when he published a video of himself delivering "vigilante justice" to people he accused of fare dodging.

At the Manchester conference, when he gave his revealing interview to Sky News, he theatrically held up a box and pulled out a judge's wig as he attacked what he called "activist" judges.

All politicians go on a journey of one sort or another during their career. But Mr Jenrick's has already been one of the most turbulent and may be about to take an even more sensational right turn.

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While Mrs Badenoch's journey brought her more than 3,000 miles from West Africa to the top of the Conservative Party, Mr Jenrick's has been political and ideological.

For example, three years after becoming an MP in a by-election, he attended Donald Trump's first inauguration as US president in 2017, though he insisted his presence was not an endorsement.

His remarkable transformation has taken him from a compassionate centrist and Cameron Remainer in the 2016 referendum to an anti-immigration zealot and standard-bearer of the Brexiteer hard right.

Among Conservative MPs, his ideological journey has earned him the nickname "Robert Generic". His response: he's been called worse things, he says.

He served in government under five Conservative prime ministers, though that's a comment on the torrid state of the Conservative party over the past decade or more.

"My values haven't changed one bit," he told Sophy Ridge in a Sky News interview during the Tory leadership campaign. But after the latest astonishing developments, his critics would fiercely dispute that.

His leadership campaign saw him take an uncompromising hard-line stance on immigration, almost to the exclusion of other issues. His core policy was to quit the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), which is now party policy.

The leading backers in his campaign were the hard men of the Tory right, including veteran Brexiteers Mark Francois and Sir John Hayes, who was previously viewed as Suella Braverman's "brain" and leading tactician.

It was a big shift from the days when, along with Rishi Sunak and Oliver Dowden, he was one of the Tories' "Three Musketeers", seen as a trio of centrist rising stars.

But Mr Jenrick has not just been on a journey from Remain to Brexit and from centrist to hard-line right winger. He's also spoken about how his upbringing in Wolverhampton shaped his values. He's described his father as a "white van man" who started his own business.

He told party activists in a "fireside chat" at the 2024 Tory conference in Birmingham that he grew up in a "working-class background".

His grandmother paid for him to go to fee-paying Wolverhampton Grammar School, he said. From there it was Cambridge University, where he read history, then political science at the University of Pennsylvania, before qualifying as a solicitor and then a job at Christie's, the art auctioneers.

It was while working as a solicitor that he met his American wife, Michal Berkner, a high-flying corporate lawyer who is eight years older than Mr Jenrick. They have three children.

He wooed the Tory activists with the disclosure that the middle name of his second daughter, Sophia, is Thatcher, because she was born the year Mrs Thatcher died.

Throughout his leadership campaign, his extroverted wife was his chief cheerleader, highly visible in the front row of the audience at most events.

His wife is Jewish and Mr Jenrick, who describes himself as "the father of a Jewish family", has been a strong pro-Israel voice, including wearing a "Hamas are terrorists" hoodie during the leadership campaign.

Many Tory MPs also believe his wife is the driving force behind his ambition. Anecdotally, it's even been claimed that she orders for him at dinner.

Mr Jenrick fought Newcastle-under-Lyme for the Tories in 2010 and was only 1,500 votes behind Labour's Paul Farrelly, before winning Newark in a by-election caused by former Conservative MP Patrick Mercer being exposed in a lobbying scandal in 2014.

Ironically, on the day Mr Mercer announced his resignation, Mr Farage said he was tempted to stand as a candidate for his United Kingdom Independence Party, and though he didn't, UKIP came second in the by-election.

Once in parliament, for three years from 2015 to 2018 under David Cameron and then Theresa May, Mr Jenrick was a parliamentary private secretary to four high-profile ministers: Esther McVey, Michael Gove, Liz Truss and Amber Rudd.

Then he got his first ministerial job, a junior minister at the Treasury, before his big break when Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019, and his career really took off, with promotion to the cabinet as housing and local government secretary.

But that was when Mr Jenrick started to become a highly controversial figure. Two major controversies stand out: a planning row involving Mr Desmond - Tory donor, property developer and publisher - and allegations he broke lockdown rules during the COVID pandemic.

First, he survived a huge row over his decision to fast-track planning permission for a £1bn property scheme in east London two weeks before Mr Desmond donated £12,000 to the Conservative party.

The pair had sat next to each other at a fundraising dinner, at which Mr Desmond showed the minister a video of the development on his mobile phone.

It was hugely controversial because Mr Jenrick's decision, later overturned, saved the Express Newspapers tycoon £45m in a local tax on property developments in the borough of Tower Hamlets.

Weeks later, Mr Jenrick was in trouble again. During COVID lockdowns, it was revealed he travelled to his parents' home in Shropshire and to his family home, a 17th-century manor house in Herefordshire, more than 150 miles from London and 130 miles from his Newark constituency.

Although Mr Jenrick said he was delivering food and medicine to his elderly parents and did not enter their house, his visit came after he appealed to people not to visit their families on Mother's Day.

He survived the furore again, but was later sacked by Mr Johnson in a September 2021 reshuffle in which his job went to Michael Gove. But he returned to government under Liz Truss, as a health minister, and then Mr Sunak appointed him immigration minister under Ms Braverman. It was claimed he was not happy - and cried.

Accused of being heartless over the painting over of the asylum centre murals, he told Sky News: "It's not something I would do again. I would never want to do anything that was anything other than compassionate towards children. I'm a dad of three young children."

Then, in December 2023, he abruptly resigned, claiming the government's contentious legislation to deport illegal asylum seekers to Rwanda was not tough enough and was "fatally flawed".

By then, Tory MPs were convinced Mr Jenrick already had leadership ambitions and was positioning himself for a bid. Not true, he insisted at the time.

There were also claims that he was furious at not being appointed to succeed Ms Braverman when she was sacked, the job going instead to James Cleverly - later a leadership rival - in the reshuffle that saw Lord Cameron's surprise appointment as foreign secretary.

Mr Jenrick's resignation and his obvious manoeuvring ahead of a leadership bid also coincided with a new trendy "Caesar" haircut and a dramatic weight loss of four stone, which he later admitted was partly due to taking the slimming drug Ozempic for six weeks.

In the early rounds of voting by Tory MPs in the 2024 leadership election, Mr Jenrick surged into the lead and was the candidate with momentum, only for Mr Cleverly to seize the momentum with a bravura performance at the Tory conference. But in the final stage of the contest, the momentum moved to Mrs Badenoch.

Despite claiming his values are the same as when he entered parliament in 2014, his views and his policies have changed significantly.

He has shifted dramatically from the Tory mainstream to the party's right flank. And now...beyond that.

In words that will delight Mr Farage, he said when he stood for the Tory leadership: "If I were an American citizen, I would be voting for Donald Trump."

And if, as now seems likely, Mr Jenrick becomes Reform UK's leading voice on tackling illegal immigration, we can surely expect some Trump-style policies.

During a trip to the US-Mexico border in 2024, he declared: "There are areas we can learn from Donald Trump and the Republican Party, one of which is illegal migration."

His days as a pro-Cameron, anti-Brexit centrist in the Tory mainstream are now a long way behind him.

(c) Sky News 2026: Robert Jenrick: From centrist Cameron Remainer to anti-immigration zealot - and now Reform