Jessaline Caine works in planning and writes about politics and policy.
Worcestershire was never just a local issue. Worcestershire may appear to be a local government row. It is not. It is a warning about whether the Conservative Party has actually learned anything from why voters stopped trusting us.
Reform took the leadership of Worcestershire County Council in May 2025, when Jo Monk was elected leader at the first full meeting after the election. By 14 May 2026, the council’s own member pages showed a fragmented chamber – 24 Reform councillors, 12 Conservatives, eight Greens, seven Liberal Democrats, four independents and two Labour councillors.
On that same day, Green councillor Matt Jenkins became leader with support from Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, independents and the Green and Independent Alliance. Conservative leader Cllr Adam Kent did not merely tolerate that outcome; he seconded Cllr Adam Jenkins’s nomination to usurp Reform. No amount of procedural waffle changes what that looks like from the outside. To ordinary Conservative voters, it looks like Conservatives helping to put a Green in charge in order to keep Reform out.
Reform handed the Conservatives plenty of ammunition. None of this requires us to pretend Reform were governing brilliantly. They were not. In April, Jo Monk lost a 15-10 internal leadership vote to Alan Amos. Days before the council meeting, Jo Monk and Ashley Monk were suspended by Reform, while Jo Monk and David Taylor launched a new Worcestershire Independent Group. Taylor had already quit Reform in February amid the council tax row.
In other words, Reform had already done the hard work of discrediting itself – infighting, suspensions, defections and a constant sense of disorder at the top. If Conservatives wanted to make a case against Reform’s fitness to govern, Worcestershire was already giving them chapter and verse.
The finances were no gift to Reform either.
Worcestershire’s own budget-setting pages laid out a bleak picture: exceptional financial support, a projected £74.3 million funding gap for 2026/27, and a request for extra council tax flexibility that fed into an 8.98 per cent rise in the county council element of Band D council tax. Cllr Adam Kent himself used ConservativeHome in March to attack Reform over that rise, over £500,000 for PwC, and over what he described as a politics of “arithmetic rather than financial discipline”. He was right about Reform’s failures. That is precisely why the Conservative group did not need a rainbow coalition with Greens to make the case. Reform were already making it for them.
The Tory mistake was political before it was mathematical.
Of course local government involves compromise. No party has a divine right to office, and a ‘largest party’ that cannot command a working majority can be displaced. Everyone understands that. But politics is not Sudoku. The numbers matter, yet the signal matters more.
The real issue in Worcestershire is not that Conservatives voted against Alan Amos. It is that they helped construct an alternative administration in which a Green took the leadership, and they did so knowingly. Kent was then himself reported to have been elected deputy leader in the new arrangement before the national party moved against him. By Thursday evening, a Conservative spokesman was saying the party had been “totally opposed” to the arrangement, that Kent had been suspended pending investigation, and that CCHQ had told councillors, “this arrangement must not go ahead”. Quite right.
If your answer to Reform is to put the Greens at the centre of power, you have not found a Conservative answer at all. You have simply built an anti-Reform bloc and hoped nobody notices. The voters will notice. They are not stupid.
This is what the trust problem looks like in practice. That matters because the distrust problem is now baked into British politics.
YouGov found last year that 67 per cent of Britons think politicians primarily act out of self-interest, while only four per cent think they do what is best for the country. Ipsos’s 2025 Veracity Index found that just nine per cent trust politicians to tell the truth, and that trust in local councillors had also fallen sharply. In that kind of climate, voters are not looking for clever procedural justifications. They are looking for evidence that parties believe something, mean it, and will stick to it under pressure.
When Conservatives spend years warning about Green ideology on energy, growth, transport and tax, then help hand a Green the leadership because the chamber arithmetic suits them, voters do not see sophistication. They see exactly the sort of tactical, establishment politics they have grown to loathe. That is the real significance of Worcestershire. It was not merely a bad local call. It was a perfect caricature of why so many people concluded the old parties say whatever is useful at the time and stand for very little when it counts.
So yes, under Kemi Badenoch, the leadership was right to intervene.
Party Chairman Kevin Hollinrake’s line that “our values are standards, not slogans” was the correct principle.
Badenoch does not need to endorse Reform, apologise for Reform, or drift into some shapeless accommodation with Farage. She should oppose Reform hard on taxes, competence, local government mondenise and the gap between populist rhetoric and administrative reality.
But she also cannot allow the Conservative Party to look so frightened of Reform that it starts behaving like an anti-Reform cartel whose only real creed is keeping the insurgents out at any cost. That would be politically suicidal. It would also be morally lazy. Badenoch has some room to enforce that discipline – by April, 72 per cent of 2024 Conservative voters viewed her favourably in YouGov’s tracker, the best number she had yet recorded with Tory voters. Leadership means spending that capital on standards, not pretending this row was too awkward to touch.
The lesson from Worcestershire is not that Conservatives must support Reform. They should not. The lesson is that opposition to Reform cannot become a substitute for Conservatism. Voters can accept losing. They can accept that a party without a majority may be pushed out of office. What they will not respect is a party that says one thing on the doorstep and does another in the council chamber, then demands applause for being tactically smart.
In March, Kent was already arguing that Reform’s tax rises, consultant spending and horse-trading amounted to a failure of leadership. He had plenty of material. The idiotic move was to throw that away by helping to create a rainbow administration that made ordinary Tory voters ask a very simple question: what exactly are we conserving now?
If the Conservative Party becomes an anti-Reform cartel, it will not defeat Reform. It will vindicate it. Worcestershire should be treated as a warning, not a model.
And on that, Kemi was right to draw the line
Jessaline Caine works in planning and writes about politics and policy.
Worcestershire was never just a local issue. Worcestershire may appear to be a local government row. It is not. It is a warning about whether the Conservative Party has actually learned anything from why voters stopped trusting us.
Reform took the leadership of Worcestershire County Council in May 2025, when Jo Monk was elected leader at the first full meeting after the election. By 14 May 2026, the council’s own member pages showed a fragmented chamber – 24 Reform councillors, 12 Conservatives, eight Greens, seven Liberal Democrats, four independents and two Labour councillors.
On that same day, Green councillor Matt Jenkins became leader with support from Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, independents and the Green and Independent Alliance. Conservative leader Cllr Adam Kent did not merely tolerate that outcome; he seconded Cllr Adam Jenkins’s nomination to usurp Reform. No amount of procedural waffle changes what that looks like from the outside. To ordinary Conservative voters, it looks like Conservatives helping to put a Green in charge in order to keep Reform out.
Reform handed the Conservatives plenty of ammunition. None of this requires us to pretend Reform were governing brilliantly. They were not. In April, Jo Monk lost a 15-10 internal leadership vote to Alan Amos. Days before the council meeting, Jo Monk and Ashley Monk were suspended by Reform, while Jo Monk and David Taylor launched a new Worcestershire Independent Group. Taylor had already quit Reform in February amid the council tax row.
In other words, Reform had already done the hard work of discrediting itself – infighting, suspensions, defections and a constant sense of disorder at the top. If Conservatives wanted to make a case against Reform’s fitness to govern, Worcestershire was already giving them chapter and verse.
The finances were no gift to Reform either.
Worcestershire’s own budget-setting pages laid out a bleak picture: exceptional financial support, a projected £74.3 million funding gap for 2026/27, and a request for extra council tax flexibility that fed into an 8.98 per cent rise in the county council element of Band D council tax. Cllr Adam Kent himself used ConservativeHome in March to attack Reform over that rise, over £500,000 for PwC, and over what he described as a politics of “arithmetic rather than financial discipline”. He was right about Reform’s failures. That is precisely why the Conservative group did not need a rainbow coalition with Greens to make the case. Reform were already making it for them.
The Tory mistake was political before it was mathematical.
Of course local government involves compromise. No party has a divine right to office, and a ‘largest party’ that cannot command a working majority can be displaced. Everyone understands that. But politics is not Sudoku. The numbers matter, yet the signal matters more.
The real issue in Worcestershire is not that Conservatives voted against Alan Amos. It is that they helped construct an alternative administration in which a Green took the leadership, and they did so knowingly. Kent was then himself reported to have been elected deputy leader in the new arrangement before the national party moved against him. By Thursday evening, a Conservative spokesman was saying the party had been “totally opposed” to the arrangement, that Kent had been suspended pending investigation, and that CCHQ had told councillors, “this arrangement must not go ahead”. Quite right.
If your answer to Reform is to put the Greens at the centre of power, you have not found a Conservative answer at all. You have simply built an anti-Reform bloc and hoped nobody notices. The voters will notice. They are not stupid.
This is what the trust problem looks like in practice. That matters because the distrust problem is now baked into British politics.
YouGov found last year that 67 per cent of Britons think politicians primarily act out of self-interest, while only four per cent think they do what is best for the country. Ipsos’s 2025 Veracity Index found that just nine per cent trust politicians to tell the truth, and that trust in local councillors had also fallen sharply. In that kind of climate, voters are not looking for clever procedural justifications. They are looking for evidence that parties believe something, mean it, and will stick to it under pressure.
When Conservatives spend years warning about Green ideology on energy, growth, transport and tax, then help hand a Green the leadership because the chamber arithmetic suits them, voters do not see sophistication. They see exactly the sort of tactical, establishment politics they have grown to loathe. That is the real significance of Worcestershire. It was not merely a bad local call. It was a perfect caricature of why so many people concluded the old parties say whatever is useful at the time and stand for very little when it counts.
So yes, under Kemi Badenoch, the leadership was right to intervene.
Party Chairman Kevin Hollinrake’s line that “our values are standards, not slogans” was the correct principle.
Badenoch does not need to endorse Reform, apologise for Reform, or drift into some shapeless accommodation with Farage. She should oppose Reform hard on taxes, competence, local government mondenise and the gap between populist rhetoric and administrative reality.
But she also cannot allow the Conservative Party to look so frightened of Reform that it starts behaving like an anti-Reform cartel whose only real creed is keeping the insurgents out at any cost. That would be politically suicidal. It would also be morally lazy. Badenoch has some room to enforce that discipline – by April, 72 per cent of 2024 Conservative voters viewed her favourably in YouGov’s tracker, the best number she had yet recorded with Tory voters. Leadership means spending that capital on standards, not pretending this row was too awkward to touch.
The lesson from Worcestershire is not that Conservatives must support Reform. They should not. The lesson is that opposition to Reform cannot become a substitute for Conservatism. Voters can accept losing. They can accept that a party without a majority may be pushed out of office. What they will not respect is a party that says one thing on the doorstep and does another in the council chamber, then demands applause for being tactically smart.
In March, Kent was already arguing that Reform’s tax rises, consultant spending and horse-trading amounted to a failure of leadership. He had plenty of material. The idiotic move was to throw that away by helping to create a rainbow administration that made ordinary Tory voters ask a very simple question: what exactly are we conserving now?
If the Conservative Party becomes an anti-Reform cartel, it will not defeat Reform. It will vindicate it. Worcestershire should be treated as a warning, not a model.
And on that, Kemi was right to draw the line