Jenrick's secret weapon

A structural advantage of whiteness

To the question: ‘Why is Robert Jenrick making more of an impact than Kemi Badenoch?’ the answer that many readers will content themselves with is that he is simply a White Man, whilst she is not — end of discussion.

There is an ingredient of truth to this but not for the reason of naked racial preference on the part of those who retweet him, rather, it is because him being a White Man gives you a huge advantage in the driving attention for contentious positions - because the ‘other side’ finds it so incredibly aggravating that they feel they have to engage with it in some way or another.

Negativity drives the algorithm and it forces the woke mob to come after you. That is why I, an internet troll, have been able to find a way to monetise my musings to enrich myself with many thousands of pounds whilst both academic and broadcasters with enormous audiences struggle to break into the Top 100 on World Politics.

The precise reason why so many of Kemi’s praetorian guard of Telegraph columnists and the Spiked editorial staff adore her - being a black woman who will give it to Keir Starmer with both barrels - is why she is struggling to make an impact.

Konstantin Kisin, Simon Heffer et al., must have this error held above their heads when the Kemi episode comes to a close in much the same way that think tanks and economists adjacent to the ‘Liz Truss experiment’ have been since 2022. If economic liberalism is now utterly discredited because of ‘The Markets’ then the same should happen to the ‘intellectual structures’ of Badenochism; the first, a sort of early internet Gen X ‘classical liberalism’ (immigrants love education, Thomas Sowell, black fathers etc) which apparently does not expand to cover banning mobile phones, the second - the belief of many estimable modernisers in black girl magic. Such was the force of these ideas within Britain’s intellectual dark web that Kemi was an experiment that it had to eventually try.

Sir Keir Starmer should be given some credit for his steadfast refusal to acknowledge any of the lame Tory attempts to smear him as ‘patronising’ - the linked article chides him for failing to ‘pay regard to the optics of a white man talking down to women’ - and to press on effortlessly tripping her up in their exchanges at Prime Minister’s Questions. What would trouble him more is if his opposite number was a fellow White Man, younger than him, calling for mass deportations.

That would bring out the frothing incoherent rage that liberals of his generation are prone to when they are confronted with bold assertions which contradict the Savile soup of Great British Telly which their minds swam about in for the first sixty years of life. We have already seen echoes of this in the frenzied media response to Bobby’s fare dodging video. The entire political left of Britain, from Dominic Grieve to Politics Joe, cannot contain their outrage at a White Man having the audacity to denounce dodgy Turkish barbershops.

Kemi Badenoch has variously denounced her ‘ethnic enemies’ and accused British Pakistanis of having a ‘tribal instinct’ to ‘protect their own’, the latter of which is much more offensive than chasing . However, these interventions have not merited a spot on the GMB sofa to be hurled abuse at by Ed Balls and Susanna Reid. It is, as the Dragon has noted before, almost impossible for a woman to be cancelled and this applies with intersectionality to race. If you want to break through onto the national media you need broadcasters that are not GB News to give you a lift - broadcasters like Sky and the BBC where a vacuous soft-leftism predominates - the best way of getting onto these platforms when you are not in Government is to push their outrage machine as far as it will go.

This is by no means an endorsement. Robert Jenrick is an interesting British politician because he is the first to use the internet as his primary mode of communication, in a country which has an anachronistic attachment to legacy media which is absent in both North America and Continental Europe. That his focus has been on the sort of thing that irritates Parliamentary Assistants from Bedfordshire is to be regretted, it is hardly Trump calling Mexicans “Bad Hombrés”.