‘Everyone is sick of this crap’: Jenrick defection deepens rightwing divide | Conservatives
The Conservatives plan to intensify their attacks on Reformation’s economic policy as they prepare for a fight to the death between the right’s two major parties; This struggle reached a new level of acrimony with the departure of Robert Jenrick.
Former shadow justice secretary Jenrick insisted he was “uniting the right” by signing up to Reform, while Kemi Badenoch portrayed her former colleague as a fraud and said there was no loss for the Conservatives, saying: “Nigel Farage is doing my spring cleaning for me.”
In a scathing TV interview of his own, Jenrick condemned Badenoch’s Conservatives and said the “arsonists” who had damaged their reputation were still at work.
While it remains to be seen whether other incumbent Tory MPs will follow Jenrick, the apparent resentment makes it extremely unlikely that Badenoch-led Conservatives will strike a deal with Reform, pitting the parties against each other in the battle for votes and English councils that will begin with elections in Scotland and Wales in May.
The Conservatives remain well behind Reform in national polls, but Badenoch and his team hope a gradual shift in voters’ attention from immigration to the economy will help his party; There was recently a Tory strategy meeting focusing on the party’s economic message.
Internal Conservative Party polls reveal economic policy as a key weakness for Reform and a sense that the party is a one-man band.
After a dramatic day on Thursday when he was forced to hastily confirm Jenrick’s switch to Reform after Badenoch’s team learned of his plans and removed him from his shadow ministerial post and party whip, he went on the attack on Friday with a BBC interview condemning his former party.
He said: “Over the last year I have come to the conclusion that… the party had not changed, the people who had made these mistakes were still sitting at the shadow cabinet table, the arsonists were still in control of the party and the party was not capable of recognizing what it had done wrong let alone fixing it.”
Asked if he risked splitting the political right in the UK with this move, he replied: “This is uniting the right. My message to the millions of people around the country who remain loyal to the Conservative Party, often through gritted teeth… If you want to get rid of this Labor government and have a strong reform government to fix the country, frankly there’s only one way to do it.”
Badenoch was equally frank about his former shadow cabinet colleague and his new party in interviews during his visit to Scotland. Asked if he could commit to the Conservatives going it alone at the next election, he said: “Yes. How do you make a deal with liars?”
Badenoch said of Jenrick: “You won’t believe a word that comes out of his mouth. It’s like asking him yesterday morning, ‘Are you going to notice?’ asked a man. And he said ‘never’ to the chief whip.”
He added: “People from Reform and other Conservative party members were bringing me things about his actions to undermine the party and I kept giving him a chance. So I’m glad Nigel Farage has done my spring cleaning for me. He’s been taking my problems away.”
Badenoch called on any Tory MPs considering a similar move to act quickly: “If these are people who don’t belong to our party, who think everything is a game and people’s lives are a game, they want all this psychodrama, then yes they should go. We don’t want people like that in the Conservative party.”
Jenrick called on other right-wingers to follow his example, writing in the Telegraph on Friday: “Join the movement if you haven’t already. The future of the country is at stake.”
But he told the BBC he had no knowledge of any other high-profile departures in the near future.
Some Conservative MPs said the relentless defense of Jenrick by Badenoch had made others more cautious and the party determined to unite. “It was all about Robert and his ambition and he needed to grow up,” one of them said. “Everybody’s tired of this nonsense.”
Nick Timothy, who was given the job of shadow justice minister by Jenrick, told Sky News that voters would not welcome his former colleague’s move.
“The country is absolutely fed up with the backbiting, the backstabbing and frankly the lack of seriousness with which many politicians have addressed the very serious and important challenges facing the country,” he said.
