Robert Jenrick has defected to Reform. It came after he was expelled from the Conservative parliamentary party and sacked from the shadow cabinet on Thursday morning by Kemi Badenoch.
Badenoch said she had “irrefutable evidence” of disloyalty. Her team had obtained a draft of a defection speech and wanted to undermine Jenrick’s plans. Over the course Thursday, plans for a Reform press conference on local government were hastily rearranged to stage Jenrick’s defection.
Farage welcomed him onto the stage as “by far the most popular figure” in the Tory party and thanked Badenoch for her radical action, which hastened a defection that had been months in the making. In a wide-ranging speech, Jenrick mercilessly attacked his former party and senior members of the shadow cabinet.
He said: “The Conservative party in Westminster isn’t sorry, it doesn’t get it, it hasn’t changed, it won’t change, it can’t change.”
He said his former colleagues refused to acknowledge that Britain was “broken” because they had broken it over 14 years of government. It was an extraordinary charge from a man who said he wanted to lead the party just over a year ago, before he was beaten to the top job by Kemi Badenoch, and man who served in senior roles in that government.
Jenrick has never made peace with the result of the 2024 Tory leadership election and the tensions with Badenoch have been obvious for the past year. He was favourite to replace her and a leadership challenge expected before Badenoch’s polling began to improve in recent months. He attacked Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, for overseeing “the explosion of the welfare bill” during his time as Work and Pensions Secretary. He attacked Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, for her time at the Home Office when she “created the very migration system that enabled 5 million migrants to come here”.
His only kind words were for the politician who forced this defection by purging him from the Tory party this morning. “I respect Kemi,” he said, though with little feeling.
“He is obviously the right person to lead the movement for change that Britain needs,” said Jenrick of Farage, his new party leader. It was distinct from the language of other defectors. Nadhim Zahawi only early this week said straightforwardly that Farage should be prime minister. When pressed by a journalist during the Q&A, Jenrick said Farage should be prime minister. He is likely to take one of the next most senior roles in the party. Jenrick has experience as a Treasury minister and could take on the economics brief.
Farage crowed that Badenoch’s preemptive attack on Jenrick had ensured a defection that he was still only 60 percent sure would happen. “I just want to say thank you to Kemi Badenoch, this is the latest Christmas present I’ve ever had,” he joked. Jenrick had not planned to join at today’s press conference and Farage said he “might not have joined at all”. “The Conservative leadership have jumped the gun on this, they’ve hoofed him out of the party, fearing that he would appear today on this platform alongside me,” said Farage.
Moments before Farage began to speak, the Conservative party released extracts of what it described as the “evidence” it had obtained surrounding Jenrick’s planned defection. The lines, which the Tories “are in doubt whatsoever” that Jenrick was involved in drafting, included phrases like “I am proud to become Reform’s 281,000th member. To back Nigel. And join this movement.”
For most of Thursday, Jenrick’s team were unreachable. One actually ran away from me on the parliamentary estate when I said hello earlier in the day, pleading that they were unable to speak. It was clear crisis talks were ongoing. At the presser Farage gleefully announced Jenrick’s defection, but there was a spine tingling delay as Jenrick failed to appear. Farage did some of his usual ad-libbing to the press pack before he arrived.
“I thought you’d changed your mind, I got a bit worried,” said Farage to Jenrick as he welcomed him to the podium.
The original plan for the presser was for Farage to present a legal paper about local election. “I’m going to save that for a couple of days,” Farage said at the beginning of the conference, because of Jenrick’s defection.
He admitted that he had been talking to Jenrick for “some weeks, some months” as well as other senior Conservative figures, adding there would be a Labour defection next week (though not that this would be an MP).
[Further reading: Is there a strategy behind Kemi’s Jenrick purge?]
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