PRESS RELEASE: POPULAR CONSERVATISM BACKS ROBERT JENRICK IN CONSERVATIVE PARTY LEADERSHIP CONTEST

The best option for making conservatism and the Conservative Party popular again.

 

After much deliberation, the Popular Conservatism (PopCon) Executive has decided to back Robert Jenrick in the leadership race to succeed Rishi Sunak as the leader of the Conservative Party.

Popular Conservatism is a grassroots-based organisation, founded in February of this year, with a database of nearly 10,000 Conservative Party members. 

Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch were by far and away the two most popular candidates amongst PopCon supporters and we congratulate them on reaching the final two.

Announcing the decision, PopCon's Director, Mark Littlewood, said: 

"The choice between Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick is finely balanced. Both have strong conservative convictions, a great ability to articulate these values and a clear strategy for leading the party back to power. Our own supporters have been fairly even split between the two of them since the contest began.

"Whoever the party decides to pick, Conservatives can have great confidence that there is every chance not just of swiftly improving the electoral fortunes of the party, but of winning the next election outright.

"However, on balance, we recommend voting for Robert Jenrick. He has laid out a clear policy plan, displayed a coherent understanding of what has gone wrong for the party in recent years, has committed to major democratic reform of the party itself and is very well placed to win over supporters who are presently attracted to Reform UK. He has shown he is willing to make bold decisions - particularly highlighted by his determination to leave the ECHR. We think he is the best option for making conservatism and the Conservative Party popular again."

 

Additional information

1. Popular Conservatism's mission is to inform and educate candidates and MPs about the need to reform Britain’s bureaucratic structures to allow conservative values to flourish; and to advance these policies across the country, whilst demonstrating their popularity. 

2. Although we know that our supporters are an independently-minded bunch of people, we wanted them to have as much useful information as possible ahead of casting their votes. To this end we submitted a series of questions to both candidates covering the key areas that PopCon was set up to campaign for and issues identified by our regular opinion panel surveys. Robert Jenrick's answers to our questions can be found hereUnfortunately, Kemi Badenoch was unable to reply by the deadline. 

3. In a recent opinion panel survey, we asked members how much they agreed or disagreed with the following statement statement, "The next Conservative leader should commit to a restoration of democratic principles in Britain by pledging to abolish a swathe of quangos and arms-length bodies which have emerged over recent years". 94.6% strongly agreed or agreed. 

In his reply to our question about this, Robert Jenrick, said, "I will bring forward a Great Reform Act to unpick New Labour's web of laws that constrain ministerial decision making. We will repeal, amend and replace the laws which have been shackling our country, such as the Equalities Act and Human Rights Act, and democratise our politics."

When we asked opinion panel members if they agreed or disagreed with Conservatives committing to leaving the ECHR and repealing the Human Rights Act. 86.1% either strongly agreed or agreed. In response, Robert Jenrick has told us that "we have to leave the ECHR and repeal the Human Rights Act."

He also agrees with us on net zero. He said that he "would get rid of the ridiculous 5-year carbon budgets which are hurting our industry. We can't afford to allow our economy to be de-industrialised. We need reliable, cheap energy - both for our homes and businesses. That's how we get growth going in our economy - not by ideologically pursuing green energy even if it raises electricity prices and damages our industry." 

4. More than 90% of our opinion panel members strongly agreed or agreed with the following statement, "The Conservative Party needs to become more democratic with a greater role for members in selecting the leader, setting policy and selecting candidates." 

Robert Jenrick has told us that he wants "to empower members to decide candidate selections... Our members should also be far more involved in shaping our policy and core principles. If our migration policy had been set by our members over the last few years our party would be in a far better position today."  

All responses and statistics from the survey quoted above, can be found here. 

The most popular choice for the role of Chairman of the Conservative Party amongst our opinion panel members was Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg (see here). Robert Jenrick has already announced that if he is elected leader, he will appoint Sir Jacob to that role. 

5. Our questions to candidates were based on:

  • the need to overhaul the UK’s bloated and unresponsive bureaucratic state whereby quangos and arms-length bodies often seem to have more power than elected politicians;
  • the urgency of restoring Parliamentary democracy in our policy-making processes and ending judicial activism by reinstating a clear divide between law and politics;
  • ensuring that Parliament can determine a credible approach to immigration and asylum and restore national and social cohesion;
  • approaching all of these policy challenges in a coherent conservative fashion;
  • applying many of the same sort of principles to the Conservative Party itself by ensuring CCHQ becomes a service centre rather than a command centre, with more power given directly to party members;
  • making sure the party has a realistic and coherent strategy to reunite the right.