Guardian swallows Robert Jenrick's asylum lie

Reporting the news that Robert Jenrick, the Tory turncoat now serving as Reform’s Treasury spokesman, had been rebuked for not providing evidence to inquiry into asylum detention this week, the Guardian quoted his spokesperson. That was a mistake.

Bobby J was censured by the chair of the independent Manston inquiry, set up to examine events surrounding the detention of thousands at a former military base in Kent in 2022, after failing to provide vital evidence about conditions there. Jenrick had been the Tory immigration minister when conditions at the base deteriorated to the point that one asylum seeker died with diphtheria.

Inquiry chair Sophie Cartwright said she had first written to Jenrick in October 2025 seeking a draft statement. Since that date, the inquiry’s legal team had agreed a number of extensions to the time limit for providing one, with the former minister missing every one.

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The Guardian quoted a spokesperson for Jenrick as saying: “Robert’s written statement will be with the inquiry in due course. It is telling that Labour commissioned an inquiry into the detention of illegal migrants, and not into the daily harm illegal migration is inflicting on the British people.”

Except, of course, Labour commissioned no such inquiry. The Manston inquiry was established by the Conservatives in 2023 – something one might think Jenrick would know, still being a member of the party at the time.

The High Court granted permission for an inquiry to take place in December 2023 – the same month as Jenrick resigned from government claiming its plan to dispatch asylum claimants to Rwanda did not go far enough – with the then home secretary, James Cleverly, agreeing to hold a statutory inquiry the following March. The incoming Labour government actually watered down what was proposed, turning it into a non-statutory inquiry.

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Space, alas, seems to have so far prevented the Guardian from correcting Jenrick’s spokesperson’s lie online, although it has managed to publish the clarification that he is Reform’s Treasury spokesman and not shadow chancellor, the title which he absurdly continues to insist on using for himself.

Meanwhile, Jenrick has been busy boasting on social media of new research showing him as the fifth best performing MP on TikTok this year, behind only his own leader, Nigel Farage, Labour backbenchers Richard Burgon and Nadia Whittome, and Jeremy Corbyn, who may or may not be the leader of Your Party (he remains an independent MP).

“That would make a lively dinner party,” chortled Jenrick, although alas it only prompted his followers to comment on how Farage’s time on TikTok contrasted with his poor attendance and voting records in the House of Commons and, indeed, his pretty much invisibility in his nominal constituency of Clacton.