“I worry that in such a short period of time, the Labour Government has created an environment which is hostile to wealth creation,” Mr Jenrick says. “It feels as if the Government doesn’t understand how wealth is created.
“We’ve got to recreate an economy in which wealth creators feel that effort will be matched, where reward will follow effort.”
This is a lesson he learned from his parents, Bill, a gas fitter from Manchester, and Jenny, a secretary from Liverpool. In the 1970s they moved to Wolverhampton, where Bill started his fireplace business and Jenny did the accounts.
In Thatcher’s Britain, working class people with entrepreneurial spirit and a talent for hard work were able to make the jump from employee to employer and flourish. At the age of 84, Bill still works full-time at his company headquarters in Telford.
A private education
Mr Jenrick’s parents also believed in the value of education, sending him to the private Wolverhampton Grammar School, with fees paid by his grandmother out of a life insurance policy following his grandfather’s death.
From there, he won a place at Cambridge to read history, where he became firm friends with fellow student Suella Braverman.
He came to politics via a brief career in the law and then at an auction house (he is a trained auctioneer), having joined the Conservative Party shortly after Tony Blair won the 1997 general election.
If Mr Jenrick is to lead the party he loves, he will have to get at least 40 colleagues to back him (including his own vote) to reach the head-to-head stage of the contest, when the membership will pick between the final two.
This month’s party conference, when the four remaining candidates will be grilled by members and make speeches, is being seen as a reset moment by some candidates, who hope to surge into the lead by wowing their audience in the way that David Cameron did in 2005.
Mr Jenrick, though, fears the process will be “dumbed down” after the party decided to give candidates just 10 minutes to make their speeches, later stretched to 20 minutes. He wants all candidates to be “tested thoroughly” rather than giving “cursory” speeches.
Weight loss
Any leadership fight risks being reduced to a beauty contest in this age of short attention spans and social media, but Mr Jenrick has got that covered too, after losing four stones in weight and an inch off his hair.
He used Ozempic to kick-start his weight loss last year but “it didn’t sit well with me”. I ask if there were unpleasant side effects (vomiting is a common one) and he squirms as he says: “I don’t want to go further.”
Since then, he says, he has shifted weight by eating more healthily and exercising more, cutting out bad habits like eating late at night and eating in motorway service stations when he was on his way home to his constituency.
As we leave his office, he returns to the issue of the Truss budget that he clearly sees as the moment that doomed the party’s chances of staying in power.
“I want to reclaim the mantle for low-tax economic growth again for the Conservative Party,” he says.
“The path that I have proposed is the harder one, because you have to confront vested interests. You have to tell the truth to your colleagues in Parliament and explain that if you want economic growth you have to do things differently.”
Bobby J, then, sees himself as a change candidate in this contest. But as Bobby K once said: “Change has its enemies.”