Sacking Jenrick marks start of fight to death with Reform

Simon Walters, The Independent

There are two ways of looking at the dramatic firing of Robert Jenrick by Kemi Badenoch. The Conservative leader’s allies see it as a mark of a newfound confidence, which has seen her run rings around Keir Starmer in the Commons and shown she can lead them back into power.

Her detractors say she risks triggering wholesale Tory defections to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, sealing Farage’s aim of replacing the Conservatives as the official opposition to Labour. Time will tell who emerges as the winner of this explosive high-stakes clash. But there is no denying that Badenoch’s statement explaining Jenrick’s dismissal is the most extraordinary I have seen in my many decades of reporting events in Westminster.

Party leaders usually smooth over such embarrassing departures with platitudes that skate over the rancorous truth. Not Badenoch. Her brief statement on Jenrick’s sacking could not have been more brutal had she grabbed him by the collar and physically kicked him out of her office. She had fired him because she had caught him red-handed “plotting in secret” to join Reform, she said — allegedly, according to one report, after a copy of his resignation speech was found by a member of Badenoch’s team “lying around”. Even worse, he planned to do it in a way designed to be “as damaging as possible” to her and her party.

Voters are sick and tired of this kind of “political psychodrama”, said Badenoch, adding, “and so am I”. Up with it, she would not put. Badenoch’s allegations of disloyalty against Jenrick were so lurid they read more like a script from the television show The Traitors than a political statement. Indeed, her Tory idol, Margaret Thatcher, renowned for keeping her cabinet on a short leash, would have lauded such decisiveness. Speculation that Newark MP Jenrick could switch to Reform has been rife among Conservative MPs for months. There have been tensions between him and Badenoch ever since she beat him in the 2024 Tory leadership contest. For much of her first year, many Conservatives thought they had chosen the wrong person.

Badenoch looked awkward in the post and struggled to make an impact. Meanwhile, Jenrick had transformed himself physically and politically. He went on a strict diet to lose his puppyish look and had a trendy “Roman style” short haircut. A former Remainer and Tory Centrist, he also adopted an ultra-hard-line pro-Brexit, pro-Trump stance. And he posed as a Tory action man, posting a video on social media of him confronting a fare dodger on the London Underground. It is a far cry from when I first interviewed Jenrick when he entered parliament via a by-election in Newark in 2014. He was visibly nervous as we sat in a cafe, presenting himself as a devoted follower of the then Tory leader David Cameron. Within months of Badenoch becoming Tory leader, there were claims that Jenrick’s supporters were plotting for him to replace her.

All that changed in the last six months as Badenoch finally found her feet as opposition leader. Week after week, she has got the better of Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions, giving a huge lift to morale on the Tory backbenches — and a lift in her opinion poll ratings too. It is no coincidence that reports of Tory MPs calling for Jenrick to replace her have evaporated — nor that reports of him planning to join Reform have increased.

Arguably, Farage needs Jenrick more than Badenoch. Reform is still hampered by its reputation as a one-man party, and its attempts to combat this by luring high-profile Conservatives have largely flopped. Farage looked almost desperate when he unveiled his latest Tory turncoat, Nadhim Zahawi, in recent days. Zahawi was forced to resign as a cabinet minister in Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government in disgrace over his tax affairs.

And he only threw in his lot with Farage after Badenoch, in another mark of her growing assertiveness, rebuffed Zahawi after he reportedly “begged her” for a peerage. But Jenrick is no Zahawi.