How about this for a take from Matthew Paris in The Times this morning:
“For Badenoch it’s time, now the nutters have gone, for an olive branch towards men like Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, David Gauke, Dominic Grieve … all driven away by Johnson. James Cleverly and the sensible shadow chancellor Mel Stride could be her envoys to the wilderness into which moderate conservatives feel we have been cast.”
He’s far from alone in the commentariat, which, among with a lot of backbench Tory MPs, is jumping on the expulsion and defection of Rob Jenrick as an opportunity to realign the Tories to… the centre. Which is odd, as Badenoch is not a classic Tory wet, indeed, she has done more to kill off Net Zero, leave the ECHR etc than any of her predecessors…
The reality is that a ‘pivot to the centre’ would be electoral suicide for the Tories – and exactly what Nigel Farage wants. As pollster James Johnson puts it:
“To be anywhere the Conservatives have to win back the votes they’ve lost to Reform since 2024 – not to mention chunk of those they lost at 2024. One in five current Tories are also open to Farage’s party.”
And as pollster James Frayne wrote over the weekend:
“In a month, when public memories of the chaos of Jenrick’s departure totally fade, the reality will be this: the party’s recent top performer will be attacking them for their failures in government and their lack of imagination in opposition. This is a disaster for Kemi Badenoch and an incredible boost for Nigel Farage.”
They’re laughing in Reform HQ…
Jenrick has said he left the Tories because “the arsonists are still in control”. Fighting fire with fire…
He told the BBC:
“I perhaps naively believed that the Conservative Party could be honest with itself about what it had got wrong, repent for those mistakes, change fundamentally and more than anybody else, I would argue in the Conservative Party, I tried to do that…I came to the conclusion over the course of the last year or so that that was not going to happen. That the party hadn’t changed. That the people who had made those mistakes were still sat around the shadow cabinet table. The arsonists were still in control of the party.”
He said that Reform would use the next coming “months and years” to put forward “the most comprehensible plan” to fix the country. He also added that although Farage has not yet promised him a job, he came to the final conclusion to defect over the Christmas period. Jenrick claims his defection is “uniting the right”…
Kemi Badenoch has come out swinging this morning, branding Jenrick a “liar” who said just yesterday morning he would “never defect.” She added that “people he’d fallen out with” brought his resignation speech to her team…
She told GB News:
“It’s quite clear that Robert Jenrick tells a lot of lies and you can’t believe a word that comes out of his mouth. This is a man who was asked yesterday morning, are you going to defect? And he said never to the chief whip when he found evidence of the speeches he was going to give. And why has all this happened? Because he’s fallen out with people and those people have brought stuff to us…This man said, ‘I want to be leader of the Conservative Party’…He is leaving because he doesn’t think that he can be leader…I’m just glad that Nigel Farage is doing my spring cleaning for me, he’s taking away my problems. The Conservative Party is even more united and stronger because we’ve lost someone who was not a team player.”
Ouch…
A bit of blowback beginning after the midday raid on Jenrick and yesterday’s madcap Westminster circus. Now Esther McVey tells the Express that she would not have advised Kemi to kick out Jenrick in the manner that she did…
Calling it a “strange move” McVey continued: “Are you going to set something in train that you can’t handle? What is going to the be the fallout from this? That would be my concern if I was advising her.”
McVey is a well established Jenrick supporter, backing his leadership campaign – she introduced him at several events. How’s this one going to be handled?
There’s no doubt that the Tory fightback against the defecting Jenrick was the only tactical option for the strategists in the office of the leader of the opposition. Rapidly expelling Jenrick and taking the wind out of his sails prompted the biggest round of Tory backslapping yesterday since the election, and the execution was swift…
How did the actions of this Tory ‘delta force’ all wash up in the Tory papers? Well, Farage has just tweeted the Telegraph splash out himself – and no wonder. A page one picture of him and Jenrick under a headline from the former Shadow Justice Secretary’s brutal defection speech: “The Tories Broke Britain” – not exactly a drubbing for Bobby J. The Mail should give even more pause to the Tories – basically a leader splash: “Stop Fighting Each Other and End the Labour Nightmare”. While the Tory apparat briefs hard against a Reform deal, now calling it an impossibility, the Mail is calling for it with more gusto than previously…
Even the milquetoast Times – whose panjandrums loathe Farage – takes a swipe. Its Chief Political Commentator Patrick Maguire had the good fortune to be embedded with Reform on the crucial day:
“Yet if we leave Westminster and take a longer view, these suggestions look a little premature. Farage’s stated ambition is to destroy the Conservative Party and to ensure Reform supplants it as the predominant party of the British right. Whatever their differences, and whatever the second-order consequences former ministers like Zahawi and Jenrick inflict on Reform’s insurgent brand, the story of this week, told simply, is that senior Tories are concluding that Farage is winning the battle for supremacy. Farage’s view is that Badenoch has unintentionally reinforced an existing impression of unstoppable momentum.”
The debate over the ‘perp walk’ will continue…
Nick Timothy has taken Robert Jenrick’s old brief as Shadow Justice Secretary. Badenoch announced the appointment on X this afternoon:
“As an MP, Nick has led the way in revealing the failure of West Midlands Police Chief over the Maccabi football ban, and in opposing Labour’s sinister Islamophobia definition. He is a true Conservative, brings a wealth of experience, and is a formidable campaigner. Nick will be a massive asset to the Shadow Cabinet team as we continue to develop our plans for a stronger economy, stronger borders and a stronger country.”
Former leader of the SNP in Westminster Ian Blackford told Times Radio why he believes Nicola Sturgeon’s claim that she spent no time in the kitchen and therefore didn’t see any of her husband’s purchases:
“She doesn’t have a passion for cooking.”
