Kemi Badenoch‘s decision to fire Robert Jenrick from the Shadow Cabinet and remove the whip has, I’m afraid, been a long time coming.
In some ways it’s a shame, because Jenrick is a talented politician with lots of energy and some great ideas – but he has, in respect of Badenoch, lost the plot.
Like many others in the Tory party, he never quite got over her election as leader in the first place. He always felt that the job should have been his and he (and his supporters, including his rather formidable wife) made very little secret of that fact. Mrs Jenrick’s side-eye at the count said it all. Ever since, he’s been on manoeuvres.
And he was shameless about it. While Badenoch was doing her best to keep what remained of the party alive, working hard to rebuild a team and repair years of damage, Jenrick was pulling stunts on the internet, building his own political brand and pursuing a relentless policy of self-promotion.
Badenoch was in the metaphorical kitchen cleaning up everyone else’s mess (a feeling many women will recognise) while her shadow justice secretary was out front pulling wheelies – and it worked.
All those disgruntled, impatient old Tories who felt she just wasn’t making swift enough progress (quite what miracles they expected after the fiasco of the election is beyond me) adopted him as their great hope.
‘Why can’t Kemi be more like Jenrick?’ they harrumphed into their claret. Answer: because she’s too busy trying to clear up the mess you made to hang around Tube stations performing citizens arrests and making TikToks.
What’s so interesting about Jenrick’s defection, though, is what it says about the current state of Badenoch’s leadership.
Robert Jenrick congratulates Kemi Badenoch after she was elected leader of the Tory party
The former Conservative Cabinet minister speaking at Reform UK’s base in Westminster
Six months ago, when it looked like she might not survive, he would never have been planning a move to Reform. At that stage, he was still expecting to inherit her job as Conservative leader.
The fact that he has clearly given up on that idea not only shows how much stronger her position now is, but what kind of person Jenrick is. He’s a mercenary. He doesn’t care whose colours he has to wear, just as long as he gets to be in power.
He’s not the only one, either. A few months ago, I sat around a dinner table with Tory peer Malcolm Offord, who defected to Reform a few weeks ago and was yesterday announced as the party’s Scottish leader, listening to him set out a (very persuasive and eloquently argued) strategy for the Conservatives’ energy strategy. He seemed very gung-ho about supporting Badenoch’s leadership at the time – and I was genuinely astonished, not to mention rather upset on her behalf, when he switched sides.
But politics is a ruthless game and you must learn how to play in order to survive, even if it’s not really in your nature. It’s not enough to be able to defend yourself against the opposition; you also need to know when to act against your real enemies, i.e. those within – and this is what Badenoch has finally done.
After months of provocation and numerous second chances, Jenrick left her with very little choice but to decapitate him, swiftly and decisively. It’s an important moment for her, politically. Over the past few months she’s been showing her mettle at the dispatch box, dissecting Keir Starmer’s character and pointing out Labour’s failures with skill and wit.
This culminated in her blistering response to Rachel Reeves’s Budget and she’s been on a roll ever since, much to the irritation of her naysayers.
Meanwhile, her personal polling with the public has been slowly ticking up. This move consolidates all that – and shows she intends to take no prisoners when it comes to asserting her authority within her own party.
This is vitally important: no leader, however popular with the public, can succeed if they can’t control their cabinet and quell internal rebellion.
One of the major problems the Tories have always had historically is petty infighting. That now changes. There will be no more of that nonsense. Badenoch has signalled that it’s her way or the highway. As the old saying goes, keep your friends close, keep your enemies locked in a cupboard and throw away the key. She also doesn’t have much time for headline-grabbing gimmicks or viral stunts. Politics is full of loud, impatient, persuasive people with plenty of snake-oil solutions, but she is not one of them.
As she once said in a debate, there are no good solutions in politics, only less bad ones. She’s a realist who works with facts, not fantasy. This doesn’t always make her popular. She doesn’t jump on bandwagons or chase clicks. She ploughs her own furrow and only makes statements when she feels she’s got something to say.
When the whole world was obsessing about the TV series Adolescence and the Prime Minister was rewriting education policy to cash in on its popularity, she surprised everyone by saying she hadn’t had time to watch it.
She was unfazed by the resulting outrage: it was just a TV programme, she argued. Grow up.
People underestimate her resilience – and her unwavering self-confidence. This is often confused for arrogance but she’s not arrogant. She’s just not a people-pleaser, which is different and unusual, especially for a woman. She makes no apology for who or what she is, and that confuses people. Especially men.
This is why Nigel Farage’s strategy of ‘undermining’ her by ‘stealing’ former Tory MPs and cabinet ministers has not had the desired effect. It’s a typically combative male approach, designed to rattle her cage and destabilise her by undermining her confidence.
Instead, it’s having the opposite effect. For a supposedly skilled operator, Farage is playing into her hands. By flushing out the traitors in her midst, he’s doing her a huge favour. He’s making her life so much easier, first by Hoovering up all the boors, troublemakers and malcontents, then by undermining his own brand by taking on toxic ex-Tories (like Nadhim Zahawi) that the public don’t much like.
Best of all, all these mad egos are Nigel’s problem now. Good luck with that. He’d do well to watch his back when Jenrick’s in the room.
None of this means, of course, that the Conservatives are going to win the next election, or indeed any election any time soon. The reputational damage done to the Tory brand over the past few years is extensive and many voters still want nothing to do with them.
But the only chance Kemi really has of convincing them otherwise is to show her commitment to a different type of politics, one that comes not so much from a place of naked personal ambition and pursuit of power for power’s sake, but one of conviction, vision, teamwork – and above all a set of moral beliefs that govern the decisions she makes.
Charming as he may be, it is a deeply dishonest and disloyal thing Jenrick has done and it shows a lack of moral fibre. No doubt he and those around him will convince themselves that it doesn’t matter, that this is yet another great victory for Reform.
But the truth is they have shown themselves to be precisely the sort of self-interested, morally vacant cowards you really don’t want to hand power to.
Badenoch, meanwhile, has shown herself to have an unflappable core of steel.
I know which one I would want running the country.