It appears that Robert Jenrick has decided to become a racist.

That is, it seems that dear old Bobby J has decided to portray himself as a bit of a racist.

If you don't know who Robert Jenrick is (and there's no reason why you should), he's Kemi Badenoch's once-and-future rival for the leadership of the British Conservative Party, a plastic-faced automaton who churns out xenophobic clichés like they’re coming back into fashion (which sadly they are).

Robbie the Robot currently holds the role of Shadow Secretary of State for Justice. Between 2018 and last year, he served in various ministerial positions in the Conservative administrations of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak, most recently as Minister of State for Immigration.

In that latter job, he distinguished himself by ordering the removal of murals depicting cartoon animals, designed to cheer up the residents at an asylum center for unaccompanied children, declaring that the place was supposed to be a "law enforcement environment" and "not a welcome center."

Evidently determined to prove himself a nastier Bob even than the murderous monster which once preyed upon the town of Twin Peaks, Jenrick went on to quit that last ministerial role on the grounds that his government's plans to deport asylum-seekers to Central Africa just didn't go far enough.

At the start of this year's Conservative Party conference, Fun Bobby courted notoriety again when he defended comments he'd made earlier this year that, when visiting an inner-city area of Birmingham (a place he described as being "as close as [he'd] come to a slum in this country"), he'd not seen "another white face".

In fact, he doubled down on that complaint by declaring (in words expressed with what seemed like calculated carelessness) that "a lack of integration leads us into a very dark place."

His remarks were roundly condemned by his political opponents, with Cabinet ministers challenging any judgment based on the colours of people's skins and the new leader of the Green Party saying that "instead of getting to know our nation of neighbours, he chose racism".

Bob Villain's view was also criticized by the Bishop of Birmingham and the former Conservative mayor of the West Midlands. Even the Shadow Chancellor distanced himself from his own close colleague, saying that he wouldn't himself have used Jenrick's words.

It's unlikely that he would have been too worried by these attacks. In truth, he might have been intending to provoke them.

He is now clearly trying to position himself for the Tory leadership once more, by trying to out-Reform Reform, by making statements even more outrageously offensive than the Radical Right rhetoric which Nigel Farage regularly spouts.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, at least from the perspective of the more politically progressive parties.

After all, the Tories are in utter disarray. They have lurched toward the policy positions espoused by Reform UK but haven't previously adopted the extreme levels of overt nastiness which constitute its preferred mode of discourse.

They have tried to remain reasonably respectable, a pillar of the very establishment which Mr. Farage’s supporters so loathe.

But they have also advocated increasing levels of tacit xenophobia, chauvinism, and anti-intellectualism, all at the same time, as being led by Ms. Badenoch, a clever black woman.

Robert Jenrick displays none of those electorally disadvantageous characteristics exhibited by his boss. Unlike Ms. Badenoch, this plainspoken white man is doing his best (despite being a Cambridge-schooled lawyer) to appeal to racist, sexist, and proudly undereducated voters.

Meanwhile, other parties are doubtless, hoping that, by making the Conservatives virtually indistinguishable from Reform, Jenrick could really split the nationalist vote, appealing, as this Farage-lite plastic populist does, to the ‘blue-rinse brigade’ of septuagenarian Tory ladies as much as to the party's grandees, reminding them perhaps of their favourite grandson or boyish bank clerk, a low-rent George Osborne on Ozempic.

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Ms. Badenoch hit back smartly against Jenrick's racist gambit – his attempt to make himself look more extremist than her – by half-heartedly defending (and in doing so belittling) his comments, suggesting that there's "nothing wrong with making observations" – while adding that she didn't "think this is where the debate should be, about how many faces people see on the street and what they look like".

Yet, simultaneously, she has stressed that politicians shouldn't shy away from tough words and actions on immigration for fear of "being labelled racists".

So, it now seems that it's alright for Conservatives to be called racists, indeed, it might be taken by some as something of a badge of honour.

This development, though it continues to shift the British political mainstream toward the Far Right, has one clear benefit: it muddies the raison d'être, the unique selling point, of Reform UK, blurring their electoral appeal with that of the Tories and undermining the party allegiances and identities of ultranationalists seeking to exploit the controversies of identity politics.

But if that means that the Tories choose to be led by their own clone of nasty Nigel, this might spell two further dangers for the future ideological direction of the UK.

The first is that it might push Farage even further up the foothills of fascism, emboldening and challenging him to drive his hate-filled politics to more desperate extremes.

The second is that it might result in the eventual merger of the Conservatives and Reform UK, creating an unstoppable anti-democratic force that could plunge the country into years, even decades, of unchecked social, economic, and cultural catastrophe.

But, as her performance this month demonstrated, Kemi Badenoch is no fool, and her prospects shouldn’t be written off too fast.

She knows how to play a crowd. Her keynote speech to her party conference hit all the right notes, pre-empting the rabid madness of the next Jen-oration.

She talked about reducing taxes and benefits, a key Tory theme.

She’d get rid of new taxes on private education and on the inheritance of large farms, restoring large wads of cash to the pockets of wealthy Tory voters.

She pledged to abolish stamp duty on the purchase of properties, a move which won’t help people to buy their first homes so much as it will push up house prices to boost the bank balances of her party’s traditional core of property-owning supporters. (Not that, four years of continuing economic turmoil away from a general election, such fiscal promises mean very much.)

She promised more police officers would be seen walking the streets, a perennial preoccupation of the Conservative imagination, despite the fact that relatively little crime takes place on those streets.

She said she’d cut the number of university places, in a sop to the anti-intellectuals who believe that higher education institutions are the breeding grounds of woke sympathies.

She’d ditch her own party’s previous commitment to cutting carbon emissions, bringing the Tories in line with such climate-change-deniers as Nigel Farage and Donald Trump.

And of course she’d deport illegal immigrants, repeal human rights legislation, and take the British out of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Hip hip blooming hurray. On your feet for a standing ovation, please, all ye party faithful, if you can still stand.

Even as the conference hall echoed to the applause of her party’s new radical right, the leader of the Liberal Democrats issued his own statement, an invitation to old-fashioned Tories of good conscience to come and join his party,people perhaps like former Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine who has said the Conservatives must never subscribe to the “populist extremism” of Nigel Farage.

And so, whether or not Badenoch retains her job for very much longer, and whether Jenrick ends up replacing her, the Conservatives’ lurch toward the values of Reform UK heralds a series of schisms and realignments in British politics which looks likely to lead us into an unpredictable and precarious new order, one in which the freedoms and securities we have come not only to cherish but also to take for granted will be at stake.