Robert Jenrick’s ‘white face’ comment splits Tory ranks

Two days later it was revealed that Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, had complained about visiting an area of Birmingham where he “didn’t see another white face”. That was not, he told a dinner at the Aldridge-Brownhills Conservative Association on 14 March, “the kind of country I want to live in. I want to live in a country where people are properly integrated.” The Guardian reported that he also compared Handsworth to a “slum”.

Quizzed about the remarks on Tuesday by a journalist on Sky News, who asked whether he realised that such comments would be seized on by far-right groups who do not want to see “brown and black people living in this country”, the Tory leadership hopeful doubled down, branding the questions “disgraceful and ridiculous”. The problem, he said, was not his comments, but “journalists like you who pop up and try to knock me down”, adding for good measure: “This is the reason why terrorist attacks happen.”

Other senior Tories in Manchester were deeply uncomfortable about Jenrick’s language. Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, told a fringe meeting organised by the pollsters More in Common: “Britishness is not about colour, it’s about values …that’s the concept of Britishness we can all get behind.”

Robbie Moore, shadow farming minister and MP for Keighley and Ilkley in West Yorkshire, agreed. “I have areas of my constituency where it will be predominantly second generation of British Pakistani Kashmiris. I have areas where it will predominantly be white working-class families,” he said.

“I have sports, whether it’s rugby league or cricket, where it will be predominantly one of those two that will be going along and attending. I have schools where it will predominantly be one of those two communities … but the conversation about how we make integration work must be about driving forward values, not colours of skin.”

The former Home Office adviser Salma Shah told the same fringe meeting: “I’m half Pakistani, half Indian, but I’m 100% British. My worry is that if we speak in these terms we end up in a very ugly ethno-nationalism space that we have never been in. We cannot make sound interventions on immigration policy if it comes from this kind of language.”

More in Common’s research suggests that Jenrick is out of step with the public. According to the polling, 74% of English people believe that non-white citizens born here can be just as English as other English people. There is broad agreement across party political allegiance, age and level of education.

The split within the Conservative ranks is symptomatic of a wider tension between those who want to chase after Reform and those who believe the Tories must differentiate themselves from Nigel Farage’s party.

Andy Street, the former Conservative West Midlands mayor, said: “I’ll put it bluntly, Robert is wrong … [Handsworth] is actually a very integrated place.” He insisted it is not “the definition of a slum”.

For Sara Khan, who was the Conservative government’s counter-extremism commissioner between 2018 and 2021, Jenrick’s comments were “racist”. She told Radio 4’s World at One: “It’s the fact that he wasn’t talking about anything else [other than skin colour] … What are the indicators that he’s using to judge that Handsworth isn’t integrated?

“Colleagues that I’ve spoken to from that area are very clear about the diversity that exists there. You have Pakistani people living there, Indian people living there, black African, black Caribbean, Bangladeshi people living there. I mean that is the definition of integration.”

Photograph by Danny Lawson/PA, Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images