Four 6 kilos in a year! No offence to former weight influencers Rishi Sunak, George Osborne, Boris Johnson and the late Nigel Lawson, but even if Robert Jenrick does not win the Tory leadership election, there is no doubt that his diet, with its rapid and impressive results, has to be the best ever devised by an unpopular Conservative politician.
What to do? Simply get a prescription for Ozempic, follow the instructions and watch the unwanted pounds melt away. Last week, Jenrick said he took Ozempic, a version of the appetite suppressant semaglutide, for about six weeks and then kept his weight down “in the normal way” through diet and exercise. He told Politico: “I took Ozempic for a short time, I didn’t particularly like it, but it helped.”
While it is unclear what weight loss may ultimately do for Jenrick’s leadership claim, his Ozempic revelation promptly reached what was months of Jenrick videos and Jenrick telegraph This is not the case with the compositions, transforming this forgettable 42-year-old into a temporary object of not exclusively negative general interest.
To enhance his weight loss, Jenrick is sporting a new Caesar haircut, a striking recreation that is reminiscent of George Osborne’s austerity policies, bordering on plagiarism.GQ Redesign, when he wanted to go from being a hated object to being a potential party leader. Of course, a tour of the expensively renovated Osborne was still unthinkable. On the other hand, how else could one explain his newspaper career and his seemingly unassailable position in the dilapidated British Museum?
As for Jenrick, before the Ozempic news, he was probably best known, if at all, for one or both of the following unpleasant episodes. The first, when he was Minister for Housing, Communities and Local Government, concerned his approval of a controversial £1 billion property deal proposed by the entrepreneur and former porn publisher Richard Desmond. Desmond had sat next to Jenrick at an event and shown him – as one does – a video about the housing project. Jenrick approved the deal so quickly that it became all the more profitable. Two weeks later, Desmond donated £12,000 to the Tory party. Jenrick was later forced to revoke his own approval, admitting it had been “unlawful due to obvious bias”.
His second big moment came in 2023, when Jenrick, now immigration minister, ordered that murals depicting cartoon characters at a reception centre for child asylum seekers be painted over because they were “too inviting”. Even Nigel Farage described the incident as “nasty”.
But now Jenrick has a third distinguishing feature: his reduced weight. Were it not for the “Ozempic shaming,” a phenomenon that often accompanies seemingly inessential treatments, it might well be a benefit. But as his fellow beneficiaries have noted, generally healthy users of semaglutide are regularly criticized for (1) using scarce supplies that diabetics and dangerously obese people require, and (2) lacking the willpower to lose weight through conventional means.
Unfortunately for any Conservative leadership contender known to have taken semaglutide for weight loss, these objections are likely to be reinforced among some members of that party by the lingering associations between obesity and government dependency/chips/moral turpitude.
You may even agree with an inspirational 2008 lecture by David Cameron about weight and personal responsibility and the need for clarity about “right and wrong behavior.”
“We talk about people who are ‘at risk of obesity’ instead of talking about people who eat too much and don’t exercise enough,” he said. “We as a society have been far too sensitive. In order not to hurt people’s feelings and not to seem judgemental, we have failed to say what needed to be said.”
We can only accept that online comments on the pictures of Cameron in a bathing suit taken after his recent dismissal (“lump of Tory lard”, “sagging belly”, “greasy whale”) express nothing more than the principled form of callousness of readers determined to help someone who clearly cannot help himself.
So the Tory candidates can only blame their colleagues if the only truly acceptable diet for a potential leader is the medically unassisted self-denial recommended to the lower classes. Sunak and Osborne have duly mastered intermittent fasting. Even Boris Johnson, who subsists on bespoke, inexpensive organic food baskets from a caring supplier, briefly considered himself qualified to offer advice on individual calorie control: “Don’t be a fat belly in your fifties.” (In your sixties, judging by a recent Johnson sighting, be his guest.)
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All of which perhaps explains why Jenrick stressed that he had only taken Ozempic for a short time and reluctantly, more or less as a supplement to more difficult lifestyle changes. Given the rather modest improvements in his appearance, he could have better spent all his willpower – in the absence of supporting drugs – on developing a personality, a distinctive voice and a national idea that goes beyond condemning immigration. Although, given the quality of most of his rivals, body mass index is arguably as good a tool as any for selecting a new leader.
With the notable exception of Kemi Badenoch, they may have been chosen to support former 10 Downing Street policy adviser Munira Mirza’s claim in a recent essay that a new generation of political leaders “struggle to find a way to communicate their views at length or articulate a vision with any depth”. And having worked for Boris Johnson, she should know.
However, assuming that successful weight loss proves to be an ideal means of converting conservative right-wingers and potential defectors to the reform movement, the question remains as to what value success in waist enlargement ultimately has in national politics.
Before the election, political pundit Peter Mandelson suggested that Keir Starmer should “lose a few pounds”. However, it seems that Starmer did not heed this request before his landslide victory. This case study is of course no substitute for a scientific refutation of the Ojenrick™ route to political acceptance, but it is nice to think that there might be more to it than BMI and haircuts.
