Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has removed her greatest internal rival, Robert Jenrick, from the Tory party as she alleges “irrefutable evidence” that he was planning to defect to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
Robert Jenrick, who has often been described as the de-facto leader of the Conservative Party given his high media profile and prominence in many consequential policy areas has been sensationally sacked from both the shadow cabinet where he held the immigration brief, and from the Conservative Party itself. Actual party leader Kemi Badenoch rolled out a suite of allegations against him on Thursday morning, claiming he was plotting to defect to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
UPDATE 1330 — Nigel Farage says he’ll buy Jenrick a pint this afternoon
While Badenoch was sacking Jenrick in London, Reform Leader Nigel Farage was in north Britain unveiling the new leader of the Scottish chapter of his party. Quizzed on the happenings of the morning by journalists afterwards, he professed to know nothing of the specific circumstances that may have pushed Badenoch to sack Jenrick, suggesting she’d panicked and acted in haste.
Mr Farage acknowledged he’d had private talks with Jenrick but dismissed that as especially consequential, noting he’d done so with many Tories. Nevertheless, he said he’d buy Jenrick a pint of beer this afternoon upon his return to London and sound him out on what he wants to do next.
Reviewing responses to the developments, the Daily Telegraph notes former Conservative Chancellor George Osborne — a key architect of the David Cameron era of broken Tory promises — observed on a podcast today that this sacking is “the proper beginning of the civil war inside the Right about who is going to lead the Right”.
This looks like it rather understates the problem; the civil war on the British right is now years-old, going back before the Brexit referendum of 2016, launched by Osborne’s boss Cameron as an attempted wipe-out strike on the Tory right. Against all his efforts that failed and the referendum passed, making the eventual split of the Conservatives and a bifurcation of the party into its constituent parts of spiritual reformists and spiritual liberals inevitable.
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Badenoch said in a recorded statement published on Thursday:
This morning I removed the Conservative whip from Robert Jenrick after dismissing him from the shadow cabinet. I was very sorry to be presented with clear, irrefutable evidence not just that he was preparing to defect, but that he was planning to do so in thje most damaging way possible to the COnservative Party and his shadow cabinet colleagues.
Ironically enough, Badenoch justified the high-profile, sudden sacking by saying the British public had endured enough “psychodrama” and deserved some peace.
Neither Robert Jenrick nor the Reform Party to which he is supposed to have been considering defection have yet commented on the allegations.
The possibility of a Jenrick defection has long been discussed in Westminster — albeit generally with tongue-in-cheek — given he was rolled out by the Tory party as an antidote against Farage, tackling the same talking points and even, at times, attempting to outflank Reform from the right. Yet Jenrick’s professed place on border control was obviously newfound, given his prominent place at the centre of the Boriswave migrant surge to the United Kingdom.
And given this track record, whether Reform itself would accept a Jenrick defection is another matter. Just last year, Nigel Farage called him a “fraud”, given Jenrick having boasted while in post as immigration minister in 2022 about how much space he’d been able to locate in the UK for new-arrived boat migrants to live in.
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