Dear Bob

An Open Letter to the Right Dishonourable Member for Newark

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Dear Bob

Hi. You don’t know me, but unfortunately I know you. I first heard the name ‘Robert Jenrick’ back in 2020. You were Housing Secretary then, and like most of the British public, I hadn’t really paid much attention to you until January that year, when it was revealed that you helped Richard Desmond avoid a £30m-£50m community levy to Tower Hamlets council. You did this by approving Desmond’s £1 billion Westferry housing development on the Isle of Dogs, the day before the council increased its community charges on new developments.

We learned that you had sat next to Desmond at a Conservative party fundraising event on 18 November the previous year, where Desmond showed you a video of the project on his mobile phone; that the government’s own planning inspector advised against the development, on the grounds that more affordable housing was needed in London’s poorest borough, and also because the development harmed the character of the area.

But you didn’t care about any of that, because Desmond was a rich man, and like most Tory MPs, you listen to rich men before you listen to anyone else, especially when they donate to your party. And Desmond knew what kind of man you were, and tickled you like a salmon, when he sent you a message in December 2019 saying:

Good news finally the inspectors reports have gone to you today, we appreciate the speed as we don’t want to give Marxists loads of doe [sic] for nothing! We all want to go with the scheme and the social housing we have proposed and spent a month at the Marxist town hall debating, thanks again, all my best, Richard.

Billionaire pornographer versus ‘Marxists’ at the town hall. It’s a no brainer, really. And so you ensured that the deal got through on 14 January - just in time to avoid the levy. And then two weeks later Desmond popped £12,000 into the Tory party coffers. Good job!

In any normal country, this would count as corruption, and you would be gone for good, but we haven’t been normal for a long time. Johnson had just become PM, and so you kept your job. You were repentant, sort of. You said how much you ‘regretted’ sitting next to Desmond. I bet you did. I would have regretted it too, in your position.

And you published your text messages in order to show how you kept your distance from him after that November meeting, even though these messages merely make it perfectly clear that both you and Dezza knew the game you were playing and the roles you were expected to play.

You conceded that your decision was technically unlawful, while also insisting - oddly - that there was ‘no actual bias’ towards Desmond. You even claimed that your decision was an expression of ‘natural justice’, despite being unlawful. How was that possible? No one knew, and I bet you didn’t know either.

Then the pandemic kicked in, and all that sleaze was forgotten. Even in the midst of the apocalypse, Tory life continued on as normal. You continued to prosper. You claimed expenses on a house you hardly used. You broke lockdown rules. You got a new job as Communities Secretary where -quelle surprise - it turned out that you were channelling most of the money from the government’s £725 million regeneration fund to Tory constituencies.

The least that can be said this, is that you are a loyal servant of your party or yourself - the difference is always hard to tell these days. Beyond Torylandia however, your brazenness and dodginess earned you a nickname: ‘Honest Bob Jenrick.’

It sounded almost Shakespearian, and it wasn’t a compliment.

You didn’t care, or if you did you never showed it. But even Johnson must have seen you as a liability, otherwise he wouldn’t have sacked you in September 2021 - nearly two years late, but never mind. And then Truss brought you back, because by then the barrel was being well and truly scraped. And when Truss went, Sunak was so short on loyalty - never mind talent - that he gave you the job of Minister for Immigration.

This is a job that tends to bring out the worst in politicians, especially nowadays, and in your case the worst was easy to find. Because it was at this point that you stopped being the smarmy, baby-faced Tory with the weird hooded eyes who appeared on the tv from time to time spouting scripted nonsense with your butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-your-mouth sincerity.

The Stop-the-Boats Man

No. You were now the stop-the-boats man, riding backseat on the tandem to Rwanda with Suella de Vil’s hair streaming in the wind as she let out a crazed yell. You took to this role as if you’d been waiting for it your life. And who could blame you. Instead of grubbing around for millionaires and chucking money at the Tory shires, you could now appeal to the worst people in the country.

How you took to it.

In a speech last April, you put your cards on the table. You spoke of potentially ‘astronomical’ invasions of the UK by millions of migrants. You condemned ‘unprecedented amounts of illegal migration which have placed our infrastructure and public services under strain, weakened community cohesion and set back integration efforts’, even though successive Tory governments have placed more strain on these services than the migrants who have arrived here.

You said the ‘UK’s adversaries are weaponising the flow of people in Europe’s near abroad’ without providing a shred of evidence for this. You warned that ‘excessive, uncontrolled migration threatens to cannibalise the compassion of the British public’, even though the UK hosts less than 1 percent of the global total of refugees.

Naturally, you supported the Rwanda policy - the foundation stone on which your government’s crumbling authority rests - on the grounds that ‘Deterrence must be restored’, even though there is no evidence that the policy would have a deterrent effect.

You argued in favour of the policy again and again in parliament, without ever once explaining how it could work on its own terms or whether it could work at all. You claimed that sending refugees to Rwanda was ‘humanitarian’, even though it was a deterrent, twisting the meaning out of words in order to justify your descent into the legal and moral void.

You did this in the same way the EU, and almost every country in Europe does, by claiming that you are saving refugees from ‘criminal gangs’, when the evidence of the last thirty-odd years makes it clear that refugees use these gangs in order to circumvent the ‘paper walls’ that keep them out.

You know this, just as you are perfectly aware of the cruelty at the heart of the Rwanda policy. But your government, for some time now, has sought to turn the channel boat crossings to its political advantage, and you accepted this challenge with all the amorality that you have already demonstrated in your other activities.

To witness this grubby hypocrisy and fake humanitarian posturing week after week was depressing enough. And then, you did something truly astounding: you ordered officials at the Kent Intake Unit - which takes in unaccompanied child asylum seekers - to paint over murals of Mickey Mouse.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of Mickey Mouse. Even as a kid I found him unappealing and charmless. But lots of kids like him, and you knew that.

According to the staff at the centre, you thought the mural was ‘too welcoming’ and sent the ‘wrong message.’ And you wanted to send a different message, that would hurt and demoralise the children who would be sitting in that waiting room.

Perhaps this was part of your ‘deterrence’ planning. Perhaps you thought that if kids see cartoons on the wall they will send a message on their luxury mobile phones to their friends, and then there will millions of children on boats, queuing up to see Mickey Mouse.

If you really believe that, you must be an idiot. And if you don’t believe it, then you simply engaging in an act of petty, malicious vindictiveness that shames your government, and the country that has allowed itself to fall into your hands.

Of course you denied this, and claimed that the mural was only removed because most of the people who passed through the centre last year were teenagers, and therefore the mural was not ‘age appropriate.’ And yet you also ordered murals to be painted over at the nearby Manston detention camp near Ramsgate, which also takes in children and families. Last month His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP) praised the family marquee at the centre for its ‘bright, cheerful colours.’

Too cheerful for you, it seems. And given the smirk that never seems to be far from your lips, I suspect that you are lying about the murals, and that you actually enjoy your notoriety, and your popularity in certain circles. Once you shilled for billionaires, now you’re the people’s tribune - defending our borders, our identity and our cohesion with an exemplary and unsentimental demonstration of ‘toughness’ aimed at…children.

All this has precedents. You studied History at university. You’re married to the child of Holocaust survivors. Maybe you remember that most states in the 1930s stopped taking accepting Jewish refugees. You may be aware of the 1938 Evian conference, where 32 countries met to coordinate an international response to the Jewish refugee problem, and refused - with the exception of the Dominican Republic - to take in refugees themselves.

In those years Jews were also seen as a potential economic burden and a threat to ‘community cohesion’, associated with ‘alien’ lifestyles and Communism. And because countries refused to take them ‘legally’, the only way most Jews could get out of Germany was to use what we now call ‘illegal’ routes, which sometimes involved paying ‘people smugglers’ to get a visa or cross a border.

You may also remember that the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany didn’t occur instantaneously. It was an incremental process, in which the Nazis simultaneously prepared the German public to become a ‘persecuting society’ and tested its responses, with a constant flow of laws and decrees that banned Jews from the right to drive a car; from holding government jobs; from attending plays and concerts; from owning farms; from having health insurance, to use the same playgrounds and locker rooms as German children.

Every law and prohibition was intended to cut another of the ties that bound Jews to German society, and in normalising this stripping away of rights and freedoms, the Nazis were able to pave the way for even stronger measures.

And this, in a way, is what your government are doing to the ‘illegal’ immigrants you persist in demonising. I’m not suggesting that you are contemplating murder or genocide - let’s put that straw man back in the barn. But it isn’t always necessary to be a Nazi, to drink from the toxic waters that the Nazis once fished from.

Sometimes being a corrupt rightwing populist government playing on fear and prejudice can take a country in a similar direction. And this, in my opinion, is what you are doing.

Your Rwanda policy is an invitation to the British public to fear and hate the people who are trying to come here, and the fake-humanitarian rhetoric that you and your fellow-ministers have used to justify this policy cannot disguise its essential cruelty. The policy may be unworkable in itself, but it provides your flailing party with a political weapon that you can use to shore up your collapsing political fortunes.

All you have to do is shout ‘Rwanda!’ or ‘lefty lawyers!’ or ‘stop the boats!’ and you will find an audience in this increasingly bitter, disorientated, and frightened country, in which too many people are too willing to blame foreigners for our collective political and social failures.

You didn’t start all this, of course. Many people have brought us to this pass. But the fact that you have embraced it all so eagerly, to the point when you are now removing children’s cartoons, does make you something of a monster.

Not the kind with horns and a tail. Nothing so grandiose. But the petty functionary-monster, the everyday banality of evil kind of monster, who does what people more powerful than you tell you to do, whatever that may be, and always kicks down in order to lift himself up. You may have taken down Mickey Mouse, but make no mistake about it: you are the rodent here.

And the fact that you are able to do this, without repercussions, is another demonstration of how far your party has pulled us all down, and how much, if we are to stop ourselves from falling even further, we need you gone.

Sincerely,

Matt