Cllr David Page represents the Market Harborough West & Foxton Division on Leicestershire County Council.
I spend a lot of my time listening to residents who are not ideological and not opposed to housebuilding, but who are simply exhausted.
They watch planning decisions go through while the same constraints are ignored again and again. The road network is already stretched. School places are tight. GP access is under pressure. Drainage is marginal in parts of the district and flood risk is treated as an afterthought. People are then told the mitigation will be sorted later. They have heard that line before. They also know who carries the risk when later never arrives.
That is the world I deal in as a County Councillor and a District Councillor.
It is not a world of slogans. It is the day-to-day grind of casework, scrutiny, highways arguments, developer promises and residents who want a straight answer. When those answers are not forthcoming, trust does not merely fade. It hardens into cynicism. That is how politics becomes brittle.
Against that backdrop, Robert Jenrick’s move to Reform is being presented as bold and principled. I do not see it that way. I see it as easy. If you have been part of a project that has gone off course, the hard choice is to stay and do the difficult work of repair.
The easy choice is to walk away and sell your departure as proof of virtue.
Conservatives also need to be honest about our own part in this. We did real damage to the public’s confidence, not because our values are wrong, but because we allowed drift and inconsistency to replace discipline. We tolerated too many Conservatives in name only, people who wore the badge but never lived the discipline behind it. Competence should have been our hallmark. Too often it became negotiable.
That is why I have little patience for lectures from those who helped make the mess and now want to be applauded for leaving it behind.
There is another issue here that matters just as much as ideology. It is integrity. Politics runs on trust long before it runs on votes. If you ask colleagues, advisers, activists and volunteers to slog their guts out for you, you owe them honesty about your intentions. If people have backed you, defended you and worked for you, then discovering that you were not straight with them has a profound effect. It is not simply disappointment. It is the feeling that something basic was missing in the person you respected. That damages morale and it damages the willingness of good people to serve at all.
Jenrick’s departure is important for another reason. It changes the pressure on Reform at the very point Reform is most exposed. Reform is no longer only a protest brand. It now runs county administrations. That is where performance can be measured. Budgets, delivery, governance, outcomes. This is where the talk meets the paperwork.
Jenrick brings a different kind of attention to that reality. A high-profile defection drags scrutiny downwards. It turns county halls into the shop window for a national pitch. Reform may like the energy of being seen as a rising force. It may like the headlines that come with senior names. It will not like what happens when those headlines are followed by detailed questions about services, spending, risk and delivery.
County hall is not forgiving. You cannot posture your way through adult social care pressures. You cannot make SEND demand disappear by being angry about it. You cannot maintain highways properly on mood music. When Reform has to make choices, it will find itself in the same place every administration ends up. It will have to balance the books, make trade-offs, and own the consequences. If it cannot do that competently, then its national story collapses quickly.
Jenrick’s move also sharpens a problem Reform already has. Reform’s identity is built on being different from the establishment. Yet the more it becomes a landing pad for ambitious Westminster careers, the more it starts to resemble the politics it claims to replace. That creates tension with its own base and tension inside its own groups. The councillors who did the graft and took the knocks are not necessarily going to welcome a Westminster figure who arrives and immediately becomes the centre of gravity. Local leadership does not enjoy being treated as a support act.
There is a further issue Reform cannot avoid. Once you start bringing in people like Jenrick, you move from being a brand to being a programme. Jenrick will not be content to be a passenger. His whole pitch is that he brings the competence and the intellectual weight that Reform is often accused of lacking. That forces Reform to decide what it actually believes once the easy lines have been used up. It forces it to set priorities and stick to them. It forces it to choose between governing discipline and permanent agitation.
That is why Jenrick’s departure is not just a Conservative story. It is a Reform story as well. It raises the expectations on Reform in the counties it controls. It heightens the internal strains that come with ambition and clashing egos. It drags attention towards delivery rather than performance. If Reform cannot govern well locally, then it will struggle to convince anyone it can govern nationally.
Conservatives should respond to this with seriousness rather than panic. We should stop pretending our problems can be solved by an exit and a rebrand. We need to rebuild from within. That means higher standards and clearer principles. It means honesty about money and the limits of the state. It means restoring competence as a political virtue. It means valuing duty over self-promotion.
That is what Thatcher understood. She did not substitute noise for reform. She respected people enough to tell them the truth and then do the hard work required to make the country function better. Her legacy does not belong to whoever shouts loudest about Britain. It belongs to those willing to make difficult decisions and live with the consequences.
Jenrick may believe Reform is an easy bet and a shorter route to the top of the right. We will see.
The immediate point is simpler. Reform is now being judged in county halls, not in studios. That judgement will be based on results. And results are where politics becomes real.