Who is Robert Jenrick?

So who is Robert Jenrick, the 38-year-old MP suddenly splattered on the front-page of every newspaper following allegations of dodgy property dealings? Most people will now that he is Secretary of State for Housing but little else about the man nicknamed Robert Generic.

And his life looks pretty generic for a Tory MP. Born in Wolverhampton in 1982, Jenrick likes to talk up how he was a grammar school boy quietly omitting the £13,000-a-year fees from his CV. When challenged that it was a fee-paying grammar, he crossly answered  that it was his grandmother, not his parents, who paid the fees. 

After reading history at Cambridge, he slipped into corporate law, and before long secured a directorship at Christie’s auction house.

Narrowly missing election in 2010,  Jenrick was parachuted into the Tory safe-seat of Newark for the 2013 by-election. The previous Tory MP, Patrick Mercer, had – in those more innocent times – just been forced to resign in a cash for lobbying scandal.  Jenrick won the seat but faced allegations of having illegally overspent in the by-election.

A subsequent Electoral Commission investigation in 2017 found the Conservatives had broken the rules by failing keep a proper record of its transactions in the by-election.

Even then property was something of headache for Jenrick. His main rival, the UKIP candidate, drew unflattering attention to the three houses Jenrick owned. They included two London properties and Grade 1 listed country-pile worth £5 million in total. While campaigning, Jenrick insisted his wealth did not mean he did not get “life on the bread line”.

After taking his seat, he climbed to minor roles first serving on the Health and Social Care Committee. He then worked as Parliament Private Secretary to three ministers in succession Esther McVey, Michael Gove and Amber Rudd. Off the back of this he managed to get elected to the Board of the Conservative Party in 2017. His first ministerial position came in 2018 as Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury.

On Brexit, he was opposed at first but later showed the zeal of a convert, or perhaps a Vicar of Bray-like sense of the way the wind was blowing; he embraced the prospect of No Deal by voting against extending Article 50 in March 2019. No surprise then that Boris Johnson appointed him Secretary of State for Housing, promoted to oversee his former boss McVey, making him the youngest member of the Cabinet.

What talents made him merit this honour is unclear. Even before the current scandal Jenrick was roundly criticised for failing to get to grips with the ongoing fallout from the Grenfell fire. He refused to meet with residents who still lived in buildings covered in the same inflammable cladding, while his policies for removing the cladding were condemned as inadequate. It is estimated some 56,000 people still live at a risk in housing with the same cladding.

Early this year he clashed with McVey who, in keeping with her touted working-class Toryism, desired to increase spending on social housing. The fairly public row lead to gleeful headlines about “class war” between the supposed working-class girl made good and her multi-millionaire many-house-owning boss.

More recently it almost seems as if Jenrick has gone out his way to rack up scandal at an almost breathless rate. In April he was caught breaching lockdown, leaving his bijou residence in London to nip first to his country seat and then to his parents. At the same time it came out that Jenrick, despite his personal wealth and high flying corporate lawyer wife, and had seen fit to charge taxpayers over £100,000 for rent and council taxes on his rarely used constituency home.