Robert Jenrick is the talk of the Tory party

In Westminster, politics is often a zero-sum game. There is a winner and a loser. But this week, two politicians from opposing sides found themselves being praised for the same thing: the Sentencing Council climbdown. After a long standoff with the government, the independent body stalled plans to bring in new rules on sentencing criminals from ethnic minorities, which were widely criticised as ‘two-tier justice’.

The plans were first revealed by Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, after he spotted advice given to magistrates and judges which would have meant certain minorities could receive preferential treatment on sentencing compared to white men. Jenrick went on the attack, warning that the rules would ‘discriminate against white people, against men, against Christians’ and that the justice system would become ‘infected by identity politics’.

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This was news to his counterpart, Shabana Mahmood, the Lord Chancellor. ‘She was asleep at the wheel,’ argues a Jenrick ally. Yet her response was not typical of Labour. Rather than defend the independent body’s decision, she went on the offensive, informing the council chairman that the ‘appearance of differential treatment before the law is particularly corrosive’. Since then, both Jenrick and Mahmood have been on separate missions to stop the rules from coming into force.

For some time now, the Ministry of Justice has rivalled the Home Office as a graveyard for aspiring politicians. There have been 12 justice secretaries since 2010 and, further down the chain, the turnover of prisons ministers became so frequent that it was a running joke in the last government.

The fact that the Justice Secretary and her shadow have become the talk of their parties shows that British politics is heading in a new direction.