Reform's Andrea Jenkyns: ‘I'm usually where there's trouble'

Times

2 days ago

Midway through my conversation with Andrea Jenkyns she becomes tearful. We're in her new office at Lincoln county council — the Union Jack hanging beside the green, blue, red and yellow of the county flag. 'I'm sorry for being emotional,' she says. The newly elected first mayor of Greater Lincolnshire is recalling the day, in July 2022, when Boris Johnson resigned as prime minister. Jenkyns describes herself as a 'Boris loyalist'. She lost her seat in Morley and Outwood, West Yorkshire, in last year's general election and then defected to Reform UK in November. As a hardline Brexiteer, and as a whip in Johnson's government, she fought to the last to save him.
On the morning of Johnson's forced resignation, so despondent was the mood — 'it was all falling apart by then' — that some of her colleagues in the whips' office were refusing to attend his speech outside 10 Downing Street. 'That fired me up. We're the whips, we go down with the praetorian guard. 'Come on,' I said, 'who's coming with me?' I felt very emotional because Boris and Carrie are decent people, great parents, you always see them with their children, and I respect them.'
As Jenkyns approached the Downing Street gates that morning, wearing a dazzling bright yellow dress, she saw Steve Bray, an anti-Brexit activist and longtime tormentor. 'He'd been hounding me for five or six years, even when [her son] Clifford was in his pram, with his big megaphone, even making Clifford cry. He can be very nasty, very provocative. And he was playing Bye Bye, Boris [from a speaker], shouting — and you couldn't even hear Boris speaking. And I thought, 'Do you know something? You guys have got what you wanted now. Just give him enough respect as prime minister to make his resignation speech.' It's about fairness, really. And I did the finger to Steve Bray. I don't swear. Well, I say the 'S-H-I-T' word if I walk into something or I'm clumsy, but that's it. But this affected me enormously. I just thought, 'Sod you, Steve Bray,' and that's what I did.'
A few days earlier she had been made an education minister in a desperate, last-gasp reshuffle by Johnson as the waters closed over him. The image of her with her middle finger raised contemptuously outside Downing Street was interpreted as an 'up yours' to the voting public. It was shared on social media and travelled far and wide, leading to her inevitable condemnation by teaching unions and her disparagers on the liberal left.
'I regret what I did, but I still feel very sad about what happened to Boris. It's about loyalty. To me, it's about being loyal to friends and family.' She pokes at her plate with a fork — a lunch of jacket potato, baked beans, grated cheese and coleslaw — and wipes her eyes. 'People in the party stabbed him in the back.'
The paradox of Jenkyns's career is that she values loyalty above all else but as a Conservative MP was serially disloyal: together with fellow Brexit ultras, she continually rebelled against and undermined Theresa May as prime minister; she submitted the first letter to Graham Brady, then chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbench MPs, demanding the resignation of Rishi Sunak early in his premiership. 'There's a pattern here,' she jokes. 'I'm usually where there's trouble.'
She was contemptuous of Sunak, whom she believed schemed to destabilise and then oust Johnson. 'Rishi was instrumental in my view. He had his tentacles on it but never seemed to wield the knife.' Later, when he was prime minister, she went to see Sunak to suggest a Conservative-Reform pact in red wall seats. 'I have empathy, and I could see a man who was struggling. I gave him a hug and he hugged me back and I really felt for him in that moment. I saw the human, not the prime minister.'
She is much less complimentary about the current Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, although she respects and likes Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, who waits for the moment to challenge for the leadership again. 'I saw Kemi in the background as a minister. She was lazy. She didn't have a natural way with people. And I think in politics, you've either got to have such strong leadership skills and conviction or you've got to have a natural way to connect with people. And I don't feel she's got either.'
Being where trouble is, and a provocateur, has personal consequences: Jenkyns has received multiple death threats and been advised to install CCTV at home. 'God, I started being called a racist during the Brexit years and a bigot and far right. Being called thick, thick as mince. I still get called that.'
As an MP she received emails from constituents threatening not only herself but her son, who recently turned eight and has autism and ADHD. She considered leaving politics altogether when she received what she described as the 'most vile message ever, saying about my child being raped. And as a parent, God, that was horrific. And I was thinking, is it worth it?'
She concluded it was, not least because she knew Nigel Farage wanted to recruit her as a senior belligerent in his people's army. 'I came over to Reform because of Nigel. When Nigel says something is happening out there, I agree: Reform are surging because they've become the voice of common sense. The number of people on the campaign trail who were saying, 'Andrea, you're speaking up for me.' We're not hard right or far right. It's common sense — it's family, believing in your country, law and order, strong borders, free speech. I genuinely believe Nigel will get into No 10 — because I've just seen it on the campaign trail, we are pulling voters from left and right.'
Jenkyns believes 'people are sick of all the woke stuff'. They are restive and weary of being preached at. 'Being told how to think, being shouted down on social media when people are struggling. They don't want to feel they've lost their voices. That's the last thing we want to give up, quite rightly. And it's why this pushback is happening.'
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Despite the surge in Reform support across the country, the campaign in Lincolnshire 'nearly broke' her. She was accused of being an illegitimate candidate because she lived in Yorkshire; she in turn accused the local Conservatives of dirty tricks. 'I wasn't moving my special needs son out of his school until I knew the outcome of the election,' she says, explaining that she is 'living between two places like a student', in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.
'I rented a place through a landlady, a widow, so I live with her because I couldn't afford to pay my mortgage and pay full rent as well. And she likes dogs. It's impossible, isn't it? A single parent. I've got a good set-up in Yorkshire. My sister, Deborah, lives nearby, so Clifford would be going there. Deborah can't drive because she's nearly blind, but she moved up from Wales to be near me. She's my rock of support, like my mum was. Clifford would visit at weekends and stay.' She and Clifford will move full time to Lincoln as soon as she has sold her house in Yorkshire.
Nevertheless, a complaint about her was made to the police. 'It got really horrible,' she says. 'I'm used to the rough and tumble of politics but when you get the police called on you, you think, 'Oh, God, I've done nothing wrong here, but what's going to happen?' '
In the event, Jenkyns won the mayoralty resoundingly by 39,548 votes ahead of Rob Waltham, the Conservative candidate. On stage that night she wore a sequined jumpsuit. 'After all the rubbish I'd been through, I wanted to make a statement and own this one. I went for the sparkly number.'
Jenkyns isn't a stranger to Lincolnshire: she spent her early childhood in Beverley, East Yorkshire, but when she was seven the family moved across the Humber Bridge. Her primary school was in the village of New Holland and she went to Matthew Humberstone, a state comprehensive in Cleethorpes. She later studied international relations as a mature student at Lincoln University. From 2009 to 2013 she served on the county council.
As the youngest of three sisters Andrea was particularly close to her father, Clifford, after whom her son is named. He was a former army lorry driver who ran several companies, including a furniture business, and became a 'madcap inventor'. When she was 18 he entered his daughter in a beauty pageant and she reached the final of Miss United Kingdom. 'He was amazing — my hero really. We were like two peas in a pod.'
An 18-year career in retail began when, as a 16-year-old, she started working at Greggs as a 'Saturday girl behind the counter earning £1.71 an hour'. And she has a hinterland, being both an accomplished soprano and a singer in a pop band. She released an album in 2006, cryptically titled Ilyis, which is an acronym for 'I love you in secret'. The name came to her in a dream: 'I kept hearing this whispering, 'Ilyis, Ilyis, I love you in secret,' and I wrote a song around it.'
She is a longtime vegetarian, although she's happy to cook meat for her son ('My little one loves meat'), and her affection for animals goes back to those early years in Yorkshire. 'When one of my father's businesses went bust we moved into a council house in a little village and he bought a field — for £200 in the Eighties! He bought us a horse from a local Gypsy camp. We had chickens, geese, ducks. It was like a wonderful, magical animal kingdom to me. I never used to have dolls in my pram. I would dress up our Jack Russell in clothes and push her about.'
Jenkyns is a Christian, though not a regular churchgoer, and believes in an afterlife. On one occasion she says 'Mum or God' was 'guiding' her. Like her son, she has been diagnosed with ADHD, is hyperactive and struggles to concentrate: 'I've written off seven cars over the years.' In conversation she digresses often, switching abruptly from one subject to the next before looping back in search of the point she had been trying to make. She can be engagingly self-deprecating. 'I'm not a feminist,' she says unprompted. 'I'm a meritocrat. If someone wants to wolf-whistle at me, at 50, bring it on.'
But there is darkness in her life. She suffers from fibromyalgia, a debilitating musculoskeletal condition; glossopharyngeal neuralgia, which causes sharp, episodic pain in her head, ears and throat; and is an acute insomniac, waking at 1am or 2am. 'I cannot relax my brain,' she says.
Her ex-husband — and Clifford's father — is the former Conservative MP for Filton and Bradley Stoke, Jack Lopresti. They divorced in April 2024. Now she shares a bed with her 'little one', Clifford. When she wakes, she might have 'mummy cuddles' with him or check on the dogs. Sometimes she writes songs in her head as she is lying there counting down the hours to daylight. At other times she thinks about political strategy: she likens herself to a chess player, assiduously plotting her next moves.
Jenkyns sought election for parliament when her father died after contracting an MRSA infection in hospital in Wakefield. She had already served as a county councillor, but her father's death politicised her. 'It was awful care. After this I wanted to help my dad and stop any more deaths from MRSA.' In 2022 her mother, Valerie, who worked in accounts in her husband's businesses, also died in hospital, from sepsis.
From the moment she was elected to parliament there was something flamboyant and iconoclastic about Jenkyns. She was provocative, unpredictable and unashamedly right wing, a hardline Brexiteer.
Her victory was notable because she defeated the incumbent, Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor at the time and one of New Labour's golden generation, in effect ending his political career. 'It felt like a David and Goliath challenge,' she says. 'At the age of 38 I'd moved back in with Mum in West Yorkshire — 'Tory Val', they called her — and spent two years on the campaign trail. It was amazing. I felt that energy on the doorstep and knew something was changing. Balls underestimated me. He thought I was just the girl next door. Constituents used to call him Man Friday — because he'd only drop in on a Friday. That first day in parliament, David Cameron and George Osborne got me standing on the desk and everyone was cheering for knocking Ed out.'
Quite soon, however, the mood at Westminster changed. 'I began seeing the bitchiness. I held a flat-warming and somebody put out an article in The Sun saying no one had turned up. But we had about 50 people turn up. I thought, 'Why are people lying?' You realise these are not necessarily your friends. It's very competitive. And it's worse on your own side.'
Her victory over Balls, by just 422 votes, prefigured the collapse of the party's red wall at the 2019 general election — and now something is stirring again in Labour-held red wall seats. 'Something is going on out there,' Farage said to me last summer when I spent a day on the campaign trail with him on the Essex coast, and Jenkyns uses the same phrase, adding that people have lost the faith they never really had in the two main parties, which are 'broken, and in the case of the Conservatives, beyond repair'.
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There is, in person, something guileless about Jenkyns. I believe her when she says she is motivated 'not by political ambition but the cause'. A refusal to compromise is the theme of her career. 'I didn't get very high at Westminster. If I'd played the game… but I can't kowtow to people. I'm very black and white.'
Her dream was to be a health minister, but Brexit became her great animating cause. She describes her politics as 'centre right'; others might identify her as uncompromisingly hard right, which she rejects. She believes in 'low taxes and being frugal with people's money'. 'I'm strong on law and order. The armed forces, crown and country. I'm very traditional about the family. On abortion, I'm very 'pro-life'. I believe it's an individual's choice but it's not something I could live with myself. I wouldn't outlaw it but it's got too liberalised. But on animal welfare I'm probably more to the left.'
As mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, working in collaboration with the Reform-controlled district council, she wants to demonstrate that the party is more than an anti-system protest movement. Like Farage, she has denounced net zero and diversity initiatives, saying they should be abolished. But I put it to her that very little of the council's budget is spent on such matters, and she agrees. Is her positioning, therefore, merely rhetorical? 'It's about using a national platform to try and influence and move the dial.'
This reminds me of something Farage told me last summer before the general election. Discussing Georgia Meloni, the populist-right prime minister of Italy, he said, 'She's disappointed some of her more radical supporters, but you know what she's done? By becoming a stable prime minister, she's actually moved the needle on a variety of issues in Italy and made them respectable.'
Moving the needle, moving the dial, whichever metaphor is used, the intention is the same: to 'make respectable' issues that were once marginal, unconscionable or considered irredeemable. Jenkyns similarly wants to be a stable mayor — to demonstrate administrative competence and rigour. She accepts that power brings responsibility and increased scrutiny. 'It's game over if we don't succeed,' she says. 'I know what's at stake.'
She concedes that some of her statements have been deliberately outrageous. I mention her recent comment that asylum seekers should be put in tents. 'I was talking about illegal migrants, not asylum seekers,' she cuts in. 'You've misquoted me there. But it should be like in France, a contained area [of tents]. Look at the stats, look at the people coming through. The majority are males, economic migrants. And people are struggling. When my fixed rate finished my mortgage went up £800 a month, which is a lot. I know what it's like as a single mum, to juggle your money. It's about fairness for the British people. I'd never say that about asylum seekers. The tent thing was intended to be provocative to make the public realise that people have had enough. People should not be put up in hotels when the British are struggling to pay their taxes. I know I'm a glutton for my own punishment, but the thing is, I always know what I'm saying. I have this brain, like a chessboard, that's thinking so many steps ahead. I know what I'm doing. The only impulsive moment was sticking the finger up.'
With that, on a radiant spring afternoon, we decide to go for a walk to Steep Hill, the fourth steepest street in the country, which leads up to Lincoln's magnificent gothic cathedral. No sooner have we left the council building than we are stopped on the street by a young man who asks Jenkyns for a selfie. 'Thank you so much for speaking up for us, Andrea,' he says, addressing her like an old friend, and they both smile as he holds up his phone. 'This keeps happening to me,' she says as we continue our walk. 'Something is going on out there. People have had enough.'