Robert Jenrick touches a pain point for the Tories as defections continue

It comes after Robert Jenrick was sacked as shadow justice secretary and suspended from the party after it emerged he was plotting to defect to Reform. He duly joined Nigel Farage’s party merely hours after his dismissal by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch.

While Badenoch outmanoeuvred Jenrick, who she said “was plotting in secret to defect in a way designed to be as damaging as possible to his shadow cabinet colleagues and the wider Conservative Party”, the leader of the Opposition finds herself in a tricky position.

Jenrick’s parting shot that the Conservatives’ reluctance to “kick out” former prime minister Liz Truss shows the party has not changed reaches a pain point that the Tories even refuse to acknowledge.

The Tories were known as the party of stability, of economic prudence, of law and order. Qualities that led to it being the most successful political party in the democratic world. Badenoch needs to instil discipline, and fast, because Reform is no longer a nuisance but a very credible threat. And the Tories are facing an existential crisis.

These gains, though, could well prove to be a double-edged sword for Farage and Reform. It is evident that Jenrick is an ambitious politician and his comments about Truss could be seen as an attempt to dictate who is and isn’t given access to the Reform off ramp from the Conservatives. There is also the danger that the more former Tories that Reform loads up its ranks with, the more the public will view it as a retread of the failures of the past decade or so.