Last week, Kemi Badenoch lost her highest profile and most popular – or, to put it more accurately, least unpopular – shadow cabinet minister, in the form of Robert Jenrick. What made this all the stranger was that this was generally portrayed as a good week for the leader of the opposition.
Jenrick had spent virtually every moment since losing the Conservative leadership contest to Badenoch preparing the ground for a rematch. She had given him the justice brief – usually a relatively sedate one, overseeing courts, probation and constitutional issues.
Jenrick responded by ignoring his supposed job and acting instead as shadow home secretary, becoming the party’s leading voice on issues like crime and immigration – notable not just because Labour is historically weaker on those issues, but because the Conservatives were being outflanked on them from the right by Reform. Few can even name the Conservative shadow home secretary, who is nominally responsible for these issues.
Jenrick was bolstered by clever social media, run by Dov Forman, who is going with him to Reform. Videos of him confronting alleged fare-dodgers on the Tube, or making dubious claims about integration in Birmingham went viral. One Tory insider says you only have to look at Badenoch’s video announcing she had sacked him to realise how good the Jenrick/Forman videos were – “Kemi’s was barely in focus”.
Badenoch repeatedly seemed completely at a loss as to how to respond to Jenrick, even suggesting to interviewers that she sincerely believed Jenrick was not plotting against her, but that the negative briefing from his camp was instead coming from allies without his knowledge – something no one in her party but her seemed to believe.
While Badenoch tried a questionable strategy of announcing no new policies for the first two years of her term, as the party engaged in a reset, Jenrick set the territory for her, in open defiance of her wishes, and she let him. For a time, talk in Conservative circles had turned to musing over when, not if, Jenrick would replace her.
But then, the narrative changed. The Westminster bubble, in recent months, decided that Badenoch had got better. Suddenly, she was doing well, they declared – getting the best of Keir Starmer at PMQs (an entirely subjective metric judged by journalists), and doing slightly better in the polls.
That poll performance was largely a mirage. The Conservatives have consistently polled worse under Badenoch than they did in the few months of Rishi Sunak acting as caretaker leader after losing the 2024 election. They still frequently poll below 20%.
However, since Zack Polanski was elected as leader of the Green Party, the 2024 Labour vote has split still further, with the Greens picking up a larger share of Labour’s voters. This means that the Tories, instead of being consistently in third place, now sometimes poll second – not because they’re doing better, but simply because Labour is doing even worse.
This might seem like a flimsy basis on which to build a “Badenoch’s doing better” narrative, but so far it has proven enough to support it. Keir Starmer handed Badenoch another lifeline by allowing elections due to be held in May in many Conservative heartlands to be postponed, stemming potential losses for the party.
The idea of Jenrick replacing Badenoch as leader after May diminished from looking like a sure-fire bet to an outside shot – and so the most ambitious man in Westminster looked to his only remaining option. He had been talking face-to-face with Farage since December, including meetings in the Commons and at a private members’ club that Badenoch and her team became aware of.
Polling had suggested that Jenrick was the most popular politician among Conservative members, but that popularity did not extend to his parliamentary colleagues – nor, apparently, to all of the party’s staff. It is a remarkable thing to be viewed as too nakedly ambitious even for modern Tories.
Now those who worked with him are letting loose. Ben Obese-Jecty, the Huntingdon MP who worked under Jenrick on the shadow justice brief, wrote, “Until yesterday morning Robert Jenrick was my boss. A man I never considered to be a potential party leader for a second. A man of no principles, who’ll say whatever he thinks will help his own career.”
Former MP Tim Loughton was equally savage, writing: “Dealt with Jenrick a lot as immigration minister whilst negotiating amendments to Immigration Bill. He invariably had to defer to officials completely out of his depth then flounced off claiming he couldn’t get his own way on reducing immigration rather than staying and fighting.”
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As Jenrick tried to negotiate his defection to Reform for maximum impact, a series of mistakes and betrayals meant that Badenoch got “irrefutable” evidence of the impending defection before it became public, and in a rare show of decisiveness she acted upon it.
Jenrick still defected, but the shock and the impact of the moment were muted. His negotiating leverage with Nigel Farage was all but destroyed – Jenrick had no real options but Reform.
Not all of Jenrick’s office has defected with him. Sam Bidwell, the policy wonk credited with the ideas behind that dramatic rightwards shift on immigration, is staying with the Conservatives, although sources insist he was not the leaker who forced a hasty defection.
What should have been a moment of maximum impact was messy, and now Jenrick is left to compete with Farage – who will be far less tolerant of his antics than Badenoch – for attention. It is well known that between Farage and a TV camera is a dangerous place to be. Zia Yusuf, Reform’s influential head of policy, is a noted Jenrick sceptic and will be watching him closely.
All of which is why people have concluded that the last few days have been good ones for Kemi Badenoch, even taking into account the defection of Andrew Rosindell on Sunday night. Seen by no one as a high-flyer, the seventh Tory MP to join Reform was politically damaged after a two-year police investigation into him over sexual assault allegations, which was eventually dropped.
Yet there will be some embarrassment for the leader who famously declared “I never have gaffes”. Knowing he was being tempted by Reform, she made Rosindell a shadow foreign minister – and therefore part of her frontbench team – and just 48 hours before he quit was telling the press she was “100% certain” there would be no more major defections.
Perhaps that all this still adds up to a good week in Toryland says less about the events themselves than about just how low expectations are for Badenoch and her party. The leader of the opposition should look like they are preparing for government – like they might be the prime minister in just a few short years.
Yet Badenoch is polling at less than 20% against a government which is the most unpopular in modern British political history. In popularity terms, no prime minister has ever done as badly as Keir Starmer, and yet Badenoch cannot cut through or catch a break. The fact she’s not getting castigated for this shows how rapidly the rules of the game have changed.
In truth, no one expects Badenoch to be the next prime minister. She’s mostly opposition leader in name only. In practice, and in the polls, that’s Farage.
Badenoch’s “good week” is less an actual triumph than a sign of the newly diminished status of the Conservative Party. The curve it is being judged against is simply survival – can it endure in its current form, and in what form will it survive? Jenrick’s departure makes a formal deal or a merger with Reform a more distant prospect, but that also leaves Badenoch needing a political identity.
For the last two years, the Conservatives have mostly tried to beat Reform by becoming Reform. Despite having formed the last government, they have relentlessly attacked the last government’s policies. They have tried to be as aggressive on immigration as Reform – usually with Jenrick banging the drum for those policies – and sometimes even overshot. Instead of trying to highlight the ways in which the Conservative Party is different from the Reform Party, they tried to show how similar they could be.
Badenoch is now left with the aftermath of Jenrick’s strategy, even if she is free of the man himself. She can hardly abandon extremist nonsense like walking away from the European Convention on Human Rights, lest he says this was why he had to defect in the first place.
But elsewhere, she has to decide what she wants her party to be. Is it the one-nation party of sound government, low taxes, and personal responsibility? Is it pro-business or populist? What is it trying to do?
There is the potential for some differentiation from Reform on foreign policy. Most UK voters, including Conservative voters, hate Donald Trump – though Reform’s are evenly split on him. That, coupled with Farage’s desire to make it seem that he has a deep personal friendship with Trump, gives Badenoch an opportunity to create some clear dark blue water, though traditionally there are few votes in foreign policy.
Badenoch might try to stick to her party’s existing course, but that leaves her fighting Reform on its own territory and with her own shadow cabinet’s best-known face on the issue now on the other team. That is the very definition of a losing battle.
But changing course requires her to decide what she’s actually trying to do, and what her party is for – tasks that have so far eluded her in the nearly 18 months or so for which she’s been leader. Jenrick has been making most of the political weather for the Conservatives. Now he’s gone, Badenoch either has to fill that space herself or wait for a new challenger to fill it for her.
The Conservative Party risks becoming just a political variant of the thin blue line, squeezed from all sides, and holding them apart, but with no real identity of its own. Badenoch finds herself, for once, applauded by her backbench MPs and large swathes of the press. But unless she steps up her efforts, and soon, she may find that they’re clapping her and her party all the way to the political gallows.
