Those pondering why Robert Jenrick defected to Reform UK have focused on the political momentum of Nigel Farage or the performance of Kemi Badenoch, but the key conversation was the one he had with his father on Boxing Day.
‘He’s a very straight talker,’ Jenrick explains when we meet at Reform’s headquarters on Tuesday afternoon. ‘He said, “If you weren’t in politics and there was a general election to-morrow, which party would you vote for?” I said, “Reform.” He said, “If you weren’t in politics, weren’t a candidate, had no particular loyalty, who would you want to be prime minister if the choice was Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage?” I said, “Nigel Farage.” He said, “Well, be honest with yourself and become a Reform MP.”’
Three weeks later Jenrick did so, when Badenoch got wind of his intentions and flushed him out. Jenrick concluded that the Conservatives’ voter-targeting strategy means they can defend barely half of the 120 seats they won in 2024. ‘It has become apparent to me that the Tory party is pursuing a 60-seat strategy,’ he says. ‘It’s a party reconciling itself to being relevant only in the posh suburbs and fancy parts of our big cities. Kensington and Wimbledon, not Newark and Wolverhampton. That’s not the people I came into politics to represent, the people I grew up around or the people that I know in north Nottinghamshire. It’s not a national party at all.’
His claims accord with documents which are circulating among Tory MPs about a strategy briefing given by Stephen Gilbert, the new head of campaigns. This sums up Labour’s likely 2029 election campaign as ‘stick with the plan’ and Reform’s as ‘change’, leaving the Tories with the negative argument ‘Stop x, y, z’.
‘My worry was that the Tory party is only going to exist in a meaningful sense in pockets of affluence’
Internal polling shows that ‘traditional Conservative’ voters number just 2.6 million. ‘Core Conservative’ voters, who are driven by a desire for competence, are another 2.2 million – a total of fewer than five million votes, down from the 6.8 million Rishi Sunak won in 2024. They identify another 1.9 million ‘Conservative/Reform deciders’, but these are very resistant to the anti-Reform messaging being planned and ‘need to believe the Conservatives can win’, which at the moment looks vanishingly unlikely.
This, Jenrick argues, is not even a ‘blue wall’ strategy to reclaim seats in the south lost to the Liberal Democrats. ‘My worry was that the Tory party is only really going to exist in a meaningful sense in pockets of affluence, predominantly in the south of England, which are not Lib Dem-facing,’ he says. ‘Many people within the Tory party are explicitly targeting people they consider to be too posh to vote Reform.’
He could have stayed and fought again for the leadership after May’s local elections, which are expected to deliver a damaging blow to Badenoch. But he concluded that ‘the party is going to be irrelevant’ and even if he had won: ‘You’re kind of the last leader of the Tory party.’
Jenrick is not alone in this analysis. He expects the donors who have backed him to start pumping money to Farage. ‘Most of the people who supported my leadership campaign are enthusiastic about Reform.’
On Monday evening, Jenrick and Farage headlined a rally in Newark, Jenrick’s seat, attended by more than 1,500 people. ‘Backstage at Reform events is a bit different to backstage at Conservative party ones,’ he grins. ‘You can get a G&T.’
The size and energy of the event confirmed for him that he has made the right choice. ‘I did over 100 events for the Conservative party over the last year. One hundred people would be a good turnout. I’d drive three hours to a village hall in Devon and there would be 20 people in the room. The contrast is very sharp. One party feels like it’s fading away and the other feels like
it has this tremendous momentum.’
Reform is attracting a broader range of support too, he insists. ‘The security guard at the rally said they had to confiscate 40 knives. I was a bit taken aback. Then he said these were tradespeople who had come there straight after their day at work. So it was an electrician or a brickie who’d had to leave behind his penknife because he’d finished a shift and had driven down to spend a couple of hours at a Reform rally. I can’t imagine any of the other political parties being able to attract someone like that.’
Jenrick returns to the point he made at his defection press conference, where he revealed a discussion in the shadow cabinet at which most senior Tories refused to agree with him that ‘Britain is broken’. He explains: ‘To me, this is the big divide in British politics. Reform has now become the vehicle for all those people in the country who believe that Britain is broken and the Conservative party, by accident or design, is ending up on the centre right, as the vehicle for those people who refuse to accept that.’
Tories who defend their record in government remind him of ‘those people who stayed on after the end of Empire, who sat in the Gymkhana Club having afternoon tea and sipping a glass of wine, reliving old glories while the world they thought they knew changed around them’. He repeats a joke someone told him about Badenoch: ‘When she heard the news, she smashed her phone into pieces but then denied that it was broken, which may sum up the situation.’
His real ire is not reserved for Badenoch, however, who he says was ‘one of the most sound people’ around the shadow cabinet table. ‘There were very few other people who in their hearts believed in the agenda that I wanted the Conservative party to pursue. And there were some people who actively disagreed.’ Here he singles out Jesse Norman, who described Jenrick’s party conference speech – which called for crackdowns on migration, net zero and wokery – as ‘lazy, mendacious, simplistic tripe’.
‘At least a third of Conservative MPs would feel more at home in the Lib Dems,’ says Jenrick. ‘There’s a third who just want an easy life and then there is a group who share my views, but it’s a minority. I spent two to three years trying to make an argument that the Tories needed to fundamentally change, and I didn’t succeed. It was like one of those balls of slime my daughters play with, moulding it into something, then when they go to bed, it just reverts to type.’
The Tories, he says, are ‘prisoners of their past’. He criticises the approval for the new Chinese embassy and the deal to sell the Chagos Islands, decisions in which ‘the Conservative party’s hands are royally dipped in the blood’. He says: ‘If the Tory party had really changed, it would have kicked Liz Truss out… If you’ve still got Liz Truss in the party, you can’t make a very credible claim to economic competency.’
Instead of wiping the slate clean, Badenoch asked James Cleverly to return to the front bench and made Priti Patel, co-architect of the ‘Boriswave’ of soaring migration, shadow foreign secretary. Jenrick says: ‘If you designed the points-based system and implemented it in government and can’t see today that it was one of the worst mistakes any government has made in my lifetime, which will scar this country for generations to come, then you should not be at the top table of the Conservative party. And if you remain so, the party is destined to fail.’
Jenrick also thinks Badenoch was ‘very naive’ to believe she could ‘take things slowly’ when there was competition on the right. ‘Reform is now the main party of the centre-right. I’m a Civil War buff. The shadow cabinet is like Charles II’s court sitting in lodgings in Paris or the Hague, arguing over who is in charge.’ It is an interesting analogy considering that the monarchy was restored, even if it took a decade.
Tories who defend their record remind him of ‘those people who stayed on after the end of Empire’
The thing he will miss least is the ‘policing of tone’ by Tory high command around his robust public interventions. This is a ‘moment of personal liberation’, he says. ‘I’ll be able to speak much more freely, weigh in in debates and questions on all sorts of issues without being chastised for that.’
His exact role will be announced by Farage in the next few weeks, but it will continue to involve his guerrilla social media videos. ‘One of the roles I will perform for Reform is as a truth teller.’ His title will not be ‘the new sheriff in town’, the Thick of It-style moniker outlined in the media plan drawn up by one of his team, which was leaked to Badenoch. ‘That was an unfortunate document produced by well-meaning but misguided advisers,’ Jenrick laughs. The culprit, who is with him, blushes.
It is clear that he will be allowed to intervene on a range of subjects, including the economy, so shadowing the chancellor would make sense. Auditioning to take on Rachel Reeves, he says: ‘Reform has a distinctive economic policy which is not just reheated Thatcherism.’ His buzzword, like Farage’s, is ‘reindustrialisation’.
Jenrick’s ambitions mean he is eventually likely to clash with his new colleagues – particularly policy chief Zia Yusuf, the most rabid anti-Tory in Reform’s ranks, and Richard Tice. Both are said to covet the party’s shadow chancellor role. ‘Zia has been extremely welcoming, and I hope we’ll work well together,’ Jenrick says. ‘He has a fierce belief that the last Conservative government betrayed the country and let down the very people it was elected to support. I don’t dis-agree with that analysis.’
Jenrick is deferential to Farage in a way Badenoch could never have dreamed. ‘You don’t join Reform unless you are willing to put your shoulder to the wheel and support Nigel as leader and to do everything you can to make him prime minister. He created this party. But it is more than that. I’ve only been here for a few days, but the organisation revolves around Nigel. His political instincts and judgment are as good or better than anybody I’ve worked with in British politics.’
Inevitably, Jenrick also consulted Danny Kruger, another high-profile Tory defector, before jumping ship. ‘The argument that Danny made was that at some point you have to put aside party loyalty and do what you think is right for the country, even if that is very difficult on a personal level.’
Jenrick’s wife, Michal Berkner, agonised over the decision with him. ‘She felt a very high degree of loyalty to the activists in Newark, because they have been incredibly nice to her. But she also believes life is short.’ It is understood she has joined Reform as well.
Six months ago, the big question in Tory circles was whether or not to oust Badenoch. Now the question is whether to follow Jenrick and defect. ‘It takes a sort of balls or madness to do it early,’ he reflects. It is unlikely he will be the last.
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