JD Vance has met Jenrick on Cotswolds visit but not expected to see Badenoch
Jenrick held an hour-long one-on-one meeting with the US vice-president on Tuesday evening, according to a source close to the shadow justice secretary.
A Conservative spokesperson said that Badenoch was also speaking to Vance this week but that scheduling time for them to meet in person had proved difficult.
Both Vance and Badenoch's teams played down the idea of a snub, but Vance's decision to hold a meeting with Jenrick will raise eyebrows.
Jenrick was defeated by Badenoch in the Conservative leadership contest last year and is widely perceived to harbour continued ambitions for the top job. He has strayed well beyond his justice brief and repeatedly caused controversy with his incendiary language on migration.
There are reports that Vance will also meet Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, on Wednesday. Farage's spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment.
A Conservative source said that Jenrick was attending a drinks event with Vance on Tuesday evening alongside others, including the former chancellor George Osborne.
They said Badenoch had been in contact with Vance but that they had been unable to find time for a meeting due to diary clashes. The US vice-president spent last weekend with David Lammy, the foreign secretary, while Badenoch has been in Epping and the Isle of Wight this week.
Both Vance and Jenrick have expressed staunch opposition to equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives, and voiced concerns about the erosion of freedom of speech.
In February, the vice-president claimed that a 'backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons' under threat, and he attacked the use of laws to enforce buffer zones around abortion clinics.
Asked about his remarks before meeting Lammy last Friday, Vance claimed that his concerns related more widely to 'the entire collective west'.
Vance is on holiday in the Cotswolds with his family and has been pictured visiting the Daylesford farm shop near Chipping Norton.
Responding to reports that Farage was due to meet Vance, the Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, called on Farage to 'tell the White House that in Europe we stand together against Putin's aggression'.
He added: 'But Farage won't do that because he's much more interested in pleasing Trump than in standing up for British values and European security.'
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Daily Mail
8 minutes ago
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Blow me down, who would have thought it? Nicola Sturgeon, the nationalist former First Minister of Scotland, who has spent her entire political life fighting for Scottish independence and slagging off evil England, now says she's thinking of leaving her native land. And where does she plan to move to? Unbelievably, her destination of choice appears to be... evil England! More specifically, she hints strongly this week that the ideal place she would like to escape to, at least for a 'wee while', is my own native London – capital of the kingdom she has tirelessly campaigned to leave. 'This may shock many people to hear,' she says, 'but I love London... So, yeah, maybe a bit of time down there. Who knows?' But will she really find the capital as pleasant a place to live as she seems to imagine? Or will she find that in moving from her own party's Scotland to mayor Sir Sadiq Khan 's Labour London, she'll just be swapping one nightmare terror for another? I'll come back to that question in a moment. But first, I'll let Ms Sturgeon explain why she's tempted to move. In an interview to promote her self-justifying, self-pitying new memoir, she tells the BBC: 'I belong to Scotland, it's my home. But I think being physically out of Scotland for a period might just help to reset my perspective and, to be more selfish about it, just remove me a little bit from that goldfish bowl scrutiny that I still live under in Scotland. 'I don't mean that as a complaint, it's just the reality that Scotland's quite a small country, it's quite a small body politic . . . Suffocating is maybe putting it too strongly, but I sometimes feel I can't breathe freely in Scotland.' Of course, Ms Sturgeon will hardly be the first Scot to head south in the hope of breathing more freely. Indeed, my own Scottish mother-in-law made that same move more than six decades ago, taking her five Ayrshire-born daughters with her, including the future Mrs U, who was then only five years old. Like Ms Sturgeon, she had recently separated from her husband – and like her, too, no doubt, she wanted to escape from her tight-knit, gossipy local community, where all her neighbours and relations knew or wanted to know everything that was going on in her life. Mind you, I suspect that the number of Scots who yearn to move south has grown ever greater since Ms Sturgeon's SNP came to power in 2007, and set about turning the country into an oppressive socialist stronghold, in thrall to mad, woke ideas. Thanks largely to England's generosity, we learned this week, every year Scotland now receives nearly £2,700 a head more in public funding than the UK average – an extraordinary £21,192 per person, compared with £18,523 in the kingdom as a whole. Yet in spite of this, Ms Sturgeon's party has managed to wreck Scotland's public services, including an education system that was once the envy of the rest of the UK. In 2006, for example, the nation achieved by far the UK's best results in maths, as measured by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's rankings. By 2022, it had plunged to second worst, a long way behind England and ahead only of Wales. Meanwhile, the number of NHS patients who have to wait more than two years for treatment north of the border is almost 100 times higher than in England, while Scotland still holds the unenviable record of having the highest number of drug deaths in Europe. Indeed, Ms Sturgeon and her party appear to have tested to destruction the theory that the way to solve social problems is to hurl ever greater quantities of other people's money at them. 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