There was a moment, a couple of hours after Kemi Badenoch had taken to social media to announce her summary political execution of Robert Jenrick, that her team began to get nervous.
‘We agreed she didn’t have any choice,’ one ally admitted to me, ‘but we were concerned about Jenrick’s response. Remember, 30 MPs backed him in the leadership contest. If he’d dug in, denied he was planning to defect, started hitting the phones to them and convinced them Kemi had overreacted to Westminster gossip, they could have made things very difficult for us.’
Fortunately for Badenoch and her edgy aides, Jenrick and his latest new best friend, Nigel Farage, made three swift blunders. The first was when Farage inexplicably admitted to journalists he’d been in discussions with the shadow justice secretary about his defection since as far back as September.
For confused Tory MPs, that provided a moment of clarity. ‘You can’t have a senior shadow cabinet member playing footsie with the leader of a rival party for half a year,’ one told me. ‘That was a sacking offence in itself.’
The second blunder was when Jenrick decided to appear at a hurriedly arranged press conference alongside Farage to make his defection official. As he walked into the room, the angry demand from his supporters that Badenoch publish the evidence proving his perfidy became moot. He was damned by his own actions.
Robert Jenrick’s decision to embrace Reform is conclusive evidence of the extent to which Kemi Badenoch’s leadership is now secure, says DAN HODGES
But worst of all was the speech he then delivered to try to justify his betrayal. Bizarrely, he opted to stick with whole sections of the address that had already been leaked to Badenoch’s team, including a back-stabbing attack on his former colleagues Mel Stride and Priti Patel. And in that instant the Tory leader was vindicated.
In the 1970s, when he was asked his views of the impact of the French Revolution, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai famously replied it was too early to tell. It will similarly be several years before we are in a position to properly assess the fall-out from the most high-profile absconsion from the Tories to Reform. But there are several fundamentals already emerging from last week’s dramatic events.
On Thursday, the airwaves and chat rooms were awash with frenzied speculation about whether Jenrick’s departure was good news or bad news for the Tory Party. To answer that question one must pose, and answer, another. Is the Tory Party stronger if it has at its helm a brave, resolute leader who has the backing of her shadow cabinet, backbenchers and wider party?
If the answer to that question is ‘yes’, then this has been a good couple of days for the Conservatives. Kemi Badenoch has emerged from the Jenrick psychodrama with her personal position immeasurably enhanced. It’s not simply that she has demonstrated her inner steel – an alloy noticeably absent from the spine of Britain’s Prime Minister.
DAN HODGES believes Robert Jenrick has become drunk – to the point of stupefaction – on his own ambition
But Jenrick’s decision to embrace Reform is of itself conclusive evidence of the extent to which her leadership is now secure, and indeed has been for several months. The reason he didn’t jump sooner was he was waiting to see if he would get another chance at becoming Tory leader himself. And he has rightly come to the conclusion that – in the short to medium term at least – no vacancy will arise.
The second fundamental is what last week’s saga has done to the standing of Jenrick himself. He is a politician with numerous qualities. He is a masterful exponent of social media. He is more thoughtful and self-aware than his Robo-Cop public persona suggests. And he has tenacity, as evidenced by his stubborn refusal to be cowed by his recent defeat in the Conservative leadership election.
But there is no avoiding a simple truth. Robert Jenrick has become drunk – to the point of stupefaction – on his own ambition. If he had calculated it would bring him closer to Downing Street, he would have been standing next to Greens leader Zack Polanski on Thursday, not Nigel Farage.
All politicians crave power. But the good ones do a semi-decent job of hiding it.
Kemi Badenoch saw Robert Jenrick coming a mile off. Aware of his supposedly secret dialogue with Farage from very early in their assignation, she and her team became seriously concerned at the beginning of December, when they were informed of a meeting between the two men in the House of Commons. These suspicions were confirmed a couple of days later, when Farage and Jenrick were spotted leaving the exclusive 5 Hertford Street club in Mayfair.
Defections are supposed to be hit-and-run jobs. Robert Jenrick effectively spent the past four months walking round Westminster with a balaclava over his head, a jemmy in one hand and a bag labelled ‘swag’ in the other. The result was that Kemi Badenoch was watching and waiting for the moment to pre-emptively strike.
Yet perhaps the most immediate and fundamental impact of Jenrick’s bungled departure is not on his old party and leader, but his new one. Nigel Farage has made enormous strides as the standard-bearer of Reform. But he has done so primarily on framing himself as the straight-talking anti-politician who sits apart from the stale and discredited political class.
Jenrick appears at a hurriedly arranged press conference alongside Reform’s Nigel Farage
Where was that straight talking last week, as he warmly embraced the man who only last August he dismissed as ‘a fraud’? How can he seriously claim to represent a break with the past when every Tory – and we are told to soon expect every Labour – retread is beating a path to his door?
‘The Tories broke Britain,’ he declared to his Twitter followers on Friday. Maybe they did. So why are these guilty men and women being so unquestioningly ushered into Reform’s ranks?
As I watched Robert Jenrick standing at that pale blue Reform lectern on Thursday, angrily berating the people who a few hours before had been his colleagues for ruining the country, it seemed he was delivering his speech two years too late.
The Boriswave. The refusal to countenance departure from the European Court of Human Rights. A failure to take a stand against a malign, woke establishment.
When Johnson, Truss and Sunak were his leaders, such criticism may have been justified. But Kemi Badenoch? Does he really think she’s weak on immigration? Or is bluffing when she pledges to walk away from the ECHR? Or lacks the stomach for taking the fight to the liberal elite?
If that is what he does think, then he is in for a shock. We will have to wait a while. But I suspect one day Robert Jenrick will come to look back on his betrayal of Kemi Badenoch, and realise it was a betrayal too far.