Robert Jenrick keeps some unfortunate company

“There’s nothing racist about caring for your family’s safety” ran the headline above a comment piece in the Sun on August 19, written by shadow justice secretary and eternal Conservative leadership candidate Robert Jenrick.

Defending protesters outside hotels hosting asylum seekers, Jenrick describes them as “peaceful and patriotic”, saying those he saw at the Bell Hotel in Epping at the weekend “weren’t racist or far right thugs – they were mums in pink t-shirts with Union Jack bunting”.

Leaving aside that Jenrick boasts that he was “the first minister to close hotels”, while neglecting to mention that, as immigration minister in 2022, he said he was “procuring more hotels at pace” and had “procured more hotels very rapidly and more are coming on board literally every day”, were all of his new friends in Epping quite the pink-clad mums he claimed?

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One he was photographed with was Eddy Butler, a founder of the neo-Nazi terrorist organisation Combat 18, named after the first and eighth letters of the alphabet, A and H, for Adolf Hitler. Butler posted a picture online of himself standing directly behind Jenrick with the text “At the Bell Hotel riding shotgun for Robert Jenrick”.

Jenrick himself posted a photo showing him talking to a woman pointing to a pink t-shirt with the words “Send them home” written on it, while Butler is pictured in the background. Jenrick’s post included the text “Great to be with peaceful, patriotic protestors in Epping today.”.

Butler came to prominence in the early 1990s when he was party organiser for the far right British National Party in Tower Hamlets, East London, and led the so-called ‘Rights for Whites’ campaign which sought to highlight supposed “bias” against white British by the local council. He was expelled from the party in 2010 for breaching the party’s code of conduct, months after attempting to challenge leader Nick Griffin.

A source close to Jenrick has insisted that the MP had “no idea” who the former BNP strategist was and did not speak to him at the rally. It’s just unfortunate that the Tory leadership hopeful has a tendency to pop up at the sort of places these people gather, before praising them as “peaceful and patriotic” in national newspapers!