Robert Jenrick was selected by local people to be the Conservative Party’s parliamentary candidate for Newcastle-under-Lyme in November 2008.
Robert was born in 1982 and grew up in Shropshire and South Staffordshire. Robert’s parents come from Manchester and Liverpool, but settled in the West Midlands in the early 1970s, where they have established a successful local manufacturing business.

Robert was educated at Wolverhampton Grammar School before gaining a first class degree in history from St. John's College, Cambridge University. Robert and his sister were the first generation of his family to go university. He subsequently studied political science on a national scholarship, the Thouron Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, living in Philadelphia, USA, before returning home to study law at the College of Law in Birmingham.

Unlike many younger MPs and candidates today, Robert has never worked in politics. After university, Robert trained and qualified as a Solicitor and has practiced in the London and Moscow offices of two of the world’s leading international law firms. He specialises in corporate law and advises businesses large and small. He also remains actively involved in the family business based in Telford that his family have run for the past 25 years, designing and manufacturing fires and fireplaces.

Robert does not come from a political background and is the first member of his family to have joined a political party. He joined the Conservative Party at age 16, but became actively involved in politics after leaving university by helping on grass-roots campaigns, such as Philip Dunne’s successful campaign in the Ludlow constituency at the 2005 general election as well as in Stafford, Crewe & Nantwich and London.

Nationally he has volunteered assisting MPs developing policies on cutting crime, protecting rural and local services, helping small businesses and encouraging entrepreneurship. He has been a primary school governor and is involved in a number of voluntary groups. He was part of the 2005 David James Review of government efficiency, has served as an unpaid legal researcher to Jonathan Djanogly MP in his capacity as Shadow Solicitor General and as a researcher in the US House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. In 2008 he travelled to Rwanda to volunteer on the Conservative Party's social action project, helping to rebuild the country's justice system following the devastating genocide.

Robert enjoys travel and has visited almost forty countries in the last ten years, the English countryside and is an amateur Staffordshire and Shropshire historian. Robert is involved in a number of local conservation and heritage groups, including being a member of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, the National Trust and Staffordshire Historic Churches Trust.