Mitchell Foyle-York: Jenrick is the internet’s latest right-wing casualty

Mitchell Foyle-York-York is a freelance writer and works for the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation.

In his first speech after defecting to become a Reform MP, given alongside Nigel Farage in a room jammed with bustling journalists, Robert Jenrick struck a consistent chord: vanity. Jenrick not only spoke of the need to “unite the right” but that he was the figure by which the right could be united.

His speech implied that a Tory Party without Jenrick lacked any serious right-of-centre coherence, and that his defection would be the final nail in the coffin for the Tories, paving the way for Reform to scoop up the right-of-centre vote. But don’t just take it from me. It was revealed in a leaked document that Jenrick’s own team had assured him that he would arrive on the Reform scene as “the new sheriff in town”. But has this proven to be the case? Is Jenrick really as influential and as popular as he likes to think?

There is still a long way to go until the next general election, but the (early) indicators are not good for Jenrick. In a YouGov poll, published the day after Jenrick’s defection was announced, it was recorded that Jenrick’s popularity rating sat at just 11 per cent, with 41 per cent of people polled saying they had an “unfavourable” view.

The same YouGov poll shows a somewhat similar trend among Tory and Reform voters (the people Jenrick was claiming to “unite”), with 39 per cent of Tory and 22 per cent of Reform voters having an “unfavourable” view of Jenrick. Furthermore, recent general election polling indicates either no gain or a small loss for Reform in national polls. As I have said, there is a long way to go, but all recent polling data suggests that Sherriff Jenrick is more Milky Bar Kid than John Wayne.

Jenrick’s opinion of himself and his political prospects may be a delusion, but delusions come from somewhere. How, even after losing the last Tory leadership election, has Jenrick been able to convince himself that he is one of the political heavyweights of our age? A clue lies in David Scullion’s review of Jenrick’s leadership campaign, published in The Critic in November 2024. In interviews with Jenrick’s own campaign team, Scullion reports that Jenrick’s spin-doctors had developed an “obsession with tweets… Everything had to go viral.” Herein lies the cause of Jenrick’s delusions: the internet.

If you were to look at Robert Jenrick’s X account, especially from the time of his leadership campaign, you might be forgiven for thinking that Jenrick was/is a very popular figure. After all, he gets plenty of ‘likes’ and ‘reposts’. The problem, however, is that the internet is not real life. Once you subtract bots and non-UK residents out of those social media engagements, what remains is barely enough engaged floating-voters to win you a seat on the local council, let alone a leadership contest!

The reality is that most people who engage feverishly with such online political content are usually ideologues with strange, niche, and sometimes even extreme, interests. They rarely reflect a significant chunk of the electorate, let alone the majority of it. Jenrick – as well as his team – appear to have been trapped inside an internet echo chamber… and it is clearly having some very damaging effects on his popularity and prospects.

The obsession with tweets, and the self-delusions the social media can cause, is certainly not limited to Jenrick. As many of us who have worked in small-c conservative politics know all too well, there is an increasing and worrying obsession with pleasing internet mobs. The internet and social media are certainly growing and important influences in modern politics, but its instant self-gratification and illusions of popularity does not warrant that we take leave of our senses and responsibilities.

Obsessions with silly pranks and videos for retweets, catering communications to a niche online crowd, or posting misleading clickbait to drive up engagement and traffic to Crowdfunders, can become a giant obstacle to undertaking serious, meaningful work that invokes the kind of change we want to see in politics.

Robert Jenrick’s defection, and how it went down with the public, offers a broader lesson for conservatives. Namely, that we should not go running to the enticing siren call of the political echo chambers of the internet right. Jenrick appears, as things stand, to have made himself unpopular by becoming so obsessed with catering to online audiences. But worse than unpopularity, he has also abandoned his own principles and conscience.

Once very much a figure on the left of the Tory Party, he now appears to simply go along with every frenzied fad of the populist right, who (by no coincidence) have a strong online presence. Many other politicians, commentators, and organisations on the right have followed a similar pattern. If this trend continues, if this prioritisation of social media clout over principle and serious work cements itself as the norm on the right, conservatives will find themselves in a very dark place indeed. We do not have to follow Robert Jenrick up the online garden path. Let us pave our own way that is grounded in dignity, principle, and a connection to reality.