The shock wave in Tory circles is palpable.
Reform will be celebrating, but Kemi Badenoch’s statement saying she has sacked Robert Jenrick from the Shadow Cabinet, removed the whip and suspended his membership of the Conservative party, is seismic.
Acting early on what Badenoch says is “irrefutable evidence” may turn out to be a positive for her but it’s going to be bad before it can get better. There is certainly some mood music, on this site and in Whatsapp groups, that taking decisive action has been seen as a plus. My colleague Tali Fraser reports Jenrick has also been removed form the Tory MP Whatsapp group.
My phone has certainly lit up and the word most used is “Wow” and then “what next?”
Good question.
There are some former and current Conservative MPs who privately still wanted Jenrick to be leader. He certainly did. And most often their reasoning had been that they wanted him to be the bridge to Reform to lead the unification of the Right. Jenrick is good friends with Pierre Poilievre the former Canadian Conservative leader who emerged after a merger of Canada’s Reform and Conservative parties.
Jenrick of course had always said he didn’t want a deal with Reform, but then he’d also said he wasn’t defecting.
He certainly had a better chance of a deal than Badenoch who has been resolute about not doing one with a party that has vowed to ‘destroy’ you. And here’s the thing, there are plenty of Conservative MPs who don’t want one either.
When Badenoch looked unsteady and quiet for much of last year there was expectation among Jenrick supporters that if May elections this year were as bad as they expected his second chance would come, and time could be bided. Besides he was making a lot of the running on his own as an irrepressible opposition attack dog. Slick videos and a self-extension of his brief to land blows as if leader, whilst Badenoch wasn’t yet hitting the mark, kept him in full view: ‘look what you could have won’
Colleagues often resented that he operated solo and didn’t run much past the leader’s office, but then he and Badenoch have had a strained relationship at the best of times
But the problem with that theory, that idea of a contest or coronation in 2026, was Badenoch bounced back.
She exuded a rediscovered confidence at last year’s Conference and ever since has steadily, if slowly, cemented her leadership, her profile and as recent data from YouGov has shown, her personal popularity. She clearly feels the window on a palace revolution has been closing so far that she could afford to joke about it at PMQs yesterday, saying she was fine and it was the Prime Minister who should be worried.
I was in the room in November 2023 when Robert Jenrick called the then Home Secretary and explained he’d shortly be resigning from the Conservative Government. I was disappointed. He was an able and energetic minister if mightily frustrated. Not least that his former friend Rishi Sunak had again passed him over for the top Home Office job.
He’s always been a workaholic and in hurry to get somewhere, but here he was walking off the pitch. However that departure of course was one reason many Conservative members liked him; that he’d stepped away from the government that, if it struggled to deliver on it’s promises, certainly managed to deliver a crushing defeat in the election a year later.
Just yesterday I said on this site that Jenrick wasn’t going to leave the party. I’ll own that. Turns out, my mistake.
I said it because as it’s my job – and because we talked candidly quite often – I’d asked him privately, outright about defection.
My reason for doing so was a New Year ‘look-ahead’ type report in the Times, by one of the lobby’s most trusted and astute journalists, Steven Swinford, which had included the danger to the Tories of a Jenrick defection to Reform.
I wanted to know from Robert himself why the rumour persisted and why he hadn’t scotched it. It seemed damaging to him and the party if there was no truth in it. He’d already had to play down suggestions of a meeting with Farage in December.
He told me he had ‘refuted it whenever it was put’ to him and would continue to do so.
When you think about it that must be true. He clearly has refuted it and to lots of people.
Which brings us to the two charges Badenoch has publicly laid against him. That he was plotting to defect to Reform and that he was going to do so in ‘such a way as to maximise the damage to the Party and to his shadow cabinet colleagues.’ Deception would be necessary if the latter charge was to be made reality.
It is the savvy Mr Swinford who is now reporting that the ‘irrefutable proof’ may have been the text of Jenrick’s resignation speech in a near final draft that was ‘lying around’. Ironic words. The document apparently went straight to Badenoch’s office.
Whatever one makes of this as a Conservative, in such circumstances she had absolutely no choice.
I would not want to be the person who may have mislaid that document. Found, it is suggested, by a fellow shadow cabinet member.
At this stage Jenrick has said nothing. Yesterday he tweeted about Labour:
“they are running the country as if they dislike it. The questions are piling up”
They certainly are. Sadly not directed at Labour now but the Conservative Party, Reform UK, and Robert Jenrick himself.
But all the shock and drama aside, has Jenrick now gone to Reform? Farage has said only this at a press conference in Scotland:
“I can confirm, hand on heart, honestly, look you in the eye, I was not going to be unveiling Robert Jenrick at 4.30pm this afternoon.”
Well that may be true but really just about timing.
Will he take him? In August last year he said of Jenrick “This man is a fraud, this man is not to be trusted” but Farage admits he’s had conversations with. May be there was no deal, but then the irrefutable proof needs refuting.
If it does happen will it be more low key now the ‘cat is out of the bag’, the surprise element gone? Will the instrument of his sacking, be the letter he produces if he does go, or will whoever mislaid it have to re-write it?
It is possible that even if Reform do take another experienced and able – no point denying it – ex-Tory so soon after the Reform membership backlash against the Zahawi defection that things don’t play out quite as Reform HQ had hoped. It’s still a hit though. It’s a palpable blow, and one I once imagined might sink the Tories under the waterline. We’re certainly in turbulent waters as a result.
The way it’s playing out now, it may not have quite the same impact, but it’s big enough and those who may have been waiting in some secret queue to exit at a Reform Press conference might just jump now.
As they say “More as we get it”