The Shadow Justice Minister’s rebrand has seen him out-Farage Farage, Brian Reade writes, and only stokes civil unrest over immigration
I always knew David Cameron and George Osborne were wolves in Centrist Dad clothing. Smooth operators branding themselves as “hug-a-hoodie” modernisers who were really hard-nosed Thatcherites preserving the elite class they were born into.
The leading Tory lights that followed didn’t even possess their disguised cunning. Boris Johnson, Suella Braverman and Liz Truss were simply car-crash clowns, who eventually horrified voters so much they handed Labour a stonking majority despite offering no policies other than “at least we’re not the car-crash clowns”.
With the latest generation of leaders, the Tories have sunk deeper into oblivion because they are nothing more than the snivelling runts of the car-crash clown litter. Kemi Badenoch was initially admired for “saying it as it is”. But even her admirers now realise what she says is mostly inane and contradictory drivel.
READ MORE: BRIAN READE: ‘We must shame rich into sharing fortunes to rebuild Broken Britain’
She will soon be toast, burnt by the flame of confected outrage spewing from the most shameless, dog-whistling, bandwagon-jumper currently crawling around the Westminster pit of snakes, namely Robert Jenrick.
Since the former One Nation Tory popped up as Sunak’s Immigration Minister he’s undergone a rebrand to out-Farage Farage. The Shadow Justice Minister wears polo shirts, has lost a bit of timber and gets filmed faking a blokish grin as he puts up Union Flags on lampposts or stands beside Tommy Robinson fanboys at asylum hotel protests.
It turns out he despises these “men from backward countries who broke into Britain illegally” because they pose an active threat to his daughters. He tweets about deporting “everyone who comes here illegally” because Britain is “well past Breaking Point” (the title of the UKIP poster that appeared the same week Jo Cox was murdered by a man shouting “This is for Britain”).
Yet here the shameless shape-shifter is on even dodgier ground than when he recently filmed himself berating fare-dodgers on the Tube and decrying London’s “lawlessness” despite once granting unlawful housing approval for a Tory donor and claiming £100,000 expenses on his third home.
Because when Jenrick ran immigration for 14 months small boat crossings hit an unprecedented high, there was a ballooning claims backlog and he publicly bragged about “ramping up” the number of asylum hotels. The same ones he protests outside today.
Such blatant hypocrisy would normally be laughed off as the ranting of a third-rate buffoon. But there is nothing to laugh about when such rhetoric from the Shadow Justice Minister appears to legitimise the growing anger and aggression towards immigrants.
It plays into the myth that every dark-skinned foreigner is a potential sex pest and indigenous Britons are hammered by the benefits system and the courts while every migrant is indulged in five-star luxury. We know where this ends.
Labour needs to urgently address this small boat crisis and the shambolic asylum hotel system which leaves many in the most exposed communities feeling resentful and fearful. But Jenrick leeching off such fears for political capital is gutter-level politics which puts everyone perceived as a foreigner at risk.
There is a moral implosion at the top of the Tory Party as people who failed spectacularly on immigration now hawk dangerous extremism to claw back relevance. And it risks civil unrest on a scale we haven’t seen since the early 1980s.
Rather than Jenrick posting footage of his grinning face at protests, this snivelling runt of the car-crash clown litter should be hiding it in shame.
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