Robert Jenrick isn’t often compared to Groucho Marx, but there’s something apposite about the latter’s line, ‘I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member’. Clearly Jenrick, who was sacked by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch yesterday before being unveiled as Reform’s latest recruit, does want to be a member of Reform. He began talks with Tim Montgomerie and then Nigel Farage last September, we learned yesterday – and, equally clearly, Reform is happy to have him as a member. But in both cases, only sort of.
Jenrick has spent the past few years telling everyone why he would never want to be a member of Reform and how vile it is
Jenrick has spent the past few years telling everyone why he would never want to be a member of Reform and how vile it, Nigel Farage and just about anyone connected to Reform really is. The receipts, as they say, are everywhere. But 180 degree turns are hardly unprecedented in politics, especially for those like Jenrick, for whom The Self is less a Jungian concept and more the driving force of political expediency. It’s all gloriously reminiscent of the classic Not The Nine O’Clock News sketch in which politicians Rowan Atkinson and Mel Smith scream abuse at each other until Atkinson has a heart attack and dies, and Smith then laments how greatly his opponent will be missed as a great parliamentarian and his close personal friend.
More likely to cause a problem is the idea that Reform is happy to have him. Farage is, obviously (at least for now). But the rest? Reform has 280,000 members, and not all of them will be offering a welcome mat to the Tory defector. And the higher up the Reform ladder you go – other than the very top Farage rung – the worse the welcome. To say there is no love lost between Zia Yusuf, Sarah Pochin and others in the upper echelons of Reform and Jenrick, about whom they could hardly have been more disparaging without breaking the laws of libel, doesn’t come close to the levels of pure hate displayed. One Reform member friend texted me yesterday: ‘I joined Reform to get away from careerist sh**s like Jenrick. He is everything we shouldn’t be.’
Gary Gibbon of Channel 4 News asked Farage and Jenrick at yesterday’s press conference if his defection marked an inflexion point in British politics. It might well do; but not in the sense Gibbon perhaps intended. Reform has welcomed into its arms a politician who thinks nothing of changing his views overnight and stabbing his colleagues in the back and front. Until now, Reform has been happy to be a one-man band (more accurately, those like Rupert Lowe who are unhappy about it being so clearly The Nigel Farage Party have been swiftly departed). Jenrick brings what we might call a different dynamic.
Meanwhile what of the Tories? It’s now become the received wisdom that Badenoch demonstrated both genuine leadership and her strength as leader yesterday. Not only has her main challenger run away because no one will play with him; there is no serious reason for anyone left to challenge her. But she nonetheless faces many deep, even existential, challenges for her party, not the least of which is how many of her parliamentary colleagues represent everything wrong with the Conservatives.
Jenrick’s motives may be suspect, but his analysis is not wholly wrong. Badenoch herself agrees that too many Conservative MPs are the problem, not the answer: the likes, for example, of Caroline Nokes, Kit Malthouse and Alicia Kearns. Pretty much every time they open their mouths you can see the anchor holding the party down pushing itself ever more firmly into the ground.
But the next big question for her and the Conservatives is what happens after the 7 May local elections. Farage could hardly have bigged up any more what he thinks is coming: total Tory destruction as a national party, as he put it yesterday. Rarely have local elections genuinely mattered more for national reasons. The clock is ticking.
Listen to Tim Shipman and James Heale discuss Jenrick’s defection on Coffee House Shots:
Comments