Robert Jenrick: From centrist Cameron Remainer to anti-immigration zealot - and now Reform

In an interview with Sky News during last autumn's Conservative conference, Robert Jenrick appeared to leave the door open to a Tory deal with Reform UK.

He was asked by deputy political editor Sam Coates: "You'd never support a pact?" And he infuriated Tory loyalists by replying: "That is not our priority. That's not a priority." Politics latest: Robert Jenrick sacked from shadow cabinet In a 2024 interview with Sky News political editor Beth Rigby, he said he would have "no problem" with Mr Farage being a member of the Conservative Party.

No wonder, then, that he has now joined forces with Mr Farage after Kemi Badenoch delivered a political bombshell earlier today by sacking him. Until he challenged Mrs Badenoch for the Conservative leadership in 2024, Mr Jenrick was perhaps best known as the minister who unlawfully intervened in a planning decision involving publisher Richard Desmond.

As immigration minister, he ordered murals of Mickey Mouse and other cartoon characters designed to welcome child asylum seekers to a reception centre in Dover to be painted over. After Mrs Badenoch became leader and appointed him to the key post of shadow justice secretary, he never hid his ambition to undermine her and ultimately oust her.

He also continued to court headlines and controversy in equal measure, never more so than when he published a video of himself delivering "vigilante justice" to people he accused of fare dodging. At the Manchester conference, when he gave his revealing interview to Sky News, he theatrically held up a box and pulled out a judge's wig as he attacked what he called "activist" judges.

All politicians go on a journey of one sort or another during their career. But Mr Jenrick's has already been one of the most turbulent and may be about to take an even more sensational right turn.

Read more:Ex-Tory chancellor Zahawi defects to ReformStarmer's three big woes revealed While Mrs Badenoch's journey brought her more than 3,000 miles from West Africa to the top of the Conservative Party, Mr Jenrick's has been political and ideological. For example, three years after becoming an MP in a by-election, he attended Donald Trump's first inauguration as US president in 2017, though he insisted his presence was not an endorsement.

His remarkable transformation has taken him from a compassionate centrist and Cameron Remainer in the 2016 referendum to an anti-immigration zealot and standard-bearer of the Brexiteer hard right. Among Conservative MPs, his ideological journey has earned him the nickname "Robert Generic".

His response: he's been called worse things, he says. He served in government under five Conservative prime ministers, though that's a comment on the torrid state of the Conservative party over the past decade or more.

"My values haven't changed one bit," he told Sophy Ridge in a Sky News interview during the Tory leadership campaign. But after the latest astonishing developments, his critics would fiercely dispute that.

His leadership campaign saw him take an uncompromising hard-line stance on immigration, almost to the exclusion of other issues. His core policy was to quit the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), which is now party policy.

The leading backers in his campaign were the hard men of the Tory right, including veteran Brexiteers Mark Francois and Sir John Hayes, who was previously viewed as Suella Braverman's "brain" and leading tactician. It was a big shift from the days when, along with Rishi Sunak and Oliver Dowden, he was one of the Tories' "Three Musketeers.