How they cheered. The Tory faithful loved it as their leader-in-waiting, Robert Jenrick, delivered a conference speech that was aimed at raising morale – and his own leadership prospects.
And he did his hopes of succeeding Kemi Badenoch no harm at all with a barnstorming performance that was animated, energetic, witty and powerful. In fact, it was a leader’s speech in all but name.
The hall, half empty for nearly all the shadow cabinet minsters’ speeches so far this week, was almost full for “Bobby J”. He may have lost the leadership election last year, but he’s the undisputed darling of the activists now and ready to step in at a moment’s notice.
Mr Jenrick’s day had started badly, however, with a row over a leaked recording in which he said he “didn’t see another white face” in Handsworth in Birmingham. Labour’s West Midlands mayor Richard Parker accused him of racism.
But by the time he took to the stage just before noon, jaunty Mr Jenrick was his usual confident self – smug, his critics would say – and grinning broadly as he walked on carrying a black metal box under his arm.
And he soon revealed its contents, a judge’s wig. Would he put it on? No, the slapstick didn’t go quite that far. He merely held it up for the benefit of the photographers hovering in front of him.
His message, essentially, was that judges are all left-wing activists. He’d found “dozens of judges” biased in favour of migrants, he claimed. “It’s like finding out halfway through a football match that the ref is actually a season ticket holder for the other side,” he quipped.
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And so to curb the power of activist judges he vowed to axe the sentencing council that he claims lets too many villains walk free. He also proposed handing the power to appoint judges to the lord chancellor.
Mr Jenrick had begun his speech with an amusing ridiculing of the new justice secretary David Lammy, having great fun with Mr Lammy’s disastrous performance on TV’s Mastermind back in 2009, when he wrongly answered several simple questions.
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Later in his speech, he launched a stinging attack on attorney general Richard Hermer, denouncing him for representing clients including Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams, comparing him to a mafia lawyer and calling him “a useful idiot for our enemies”.
And his audience loved his ferocious onslaught against Sir Keir Starmer, which began: “He’s combined the management style of David Brent with the administrative grip of Baldrick from Blackadder.”
Then came this: “He has proven himself to be a freebie-grabbing, free speech-stifling, criminal-releasing, tax-raising, farmer-hating, Brexit-betraying, aspiration-sapping sorry excuse for a leader.
“This is someone who makes a hole in the air look substantial, Peter Mandelson appear trustworthy, and Mr Bean look like a model of competence and grip.”
Boom, boom! Crude, but effective.
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A surprise in his speech came when the Euro-sceptic Mr Jenrick praised the arch-Europhile Michael Heseltine, due to address a conference fringe meeting a few hours later.
“When he was a young man in opposition, back in the 1970s under Margaret Thatcher, he would wake up every morning and he’d ask his wife, how am I going to fight, fight, fight Labour today?” said Mr Jenrick.
“And at the end of the day, he would lie in bed again, and he would ask his wife – well, he obviously wasn’t a very romantic man – tomorrow, how am I going to fight, fight, fight Labour.”
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And then, urging the Tories to fight, he defined his British values: “A love of pubs, our love of animals, the common law, jury trials, a royal family so admired that they make the most powerful man in the world go weak at the knees…
“A military that has defeated every force on the planet, the roar of the crowd at Twickenham as the Red Roses beat the Canadians or Chris Woakes, arm in a sling goes out to bat at The Oval.”
Stirring stuff. If the Tory faithful were not shaken, they were certainly stirred by a speech that brought a previously flat and uninspiring Tory conference to life spectacularly.
Follow that, Kemi. No pressure!
