Conservative Party defector Robert Jenrick and Reform Party leader Nigel Farage read their lines at a press conference, January 15, 2026

This was meant to be the UK’s political equivalent of Football Transfer Deadline Day: dramatic, suspenseful, historic. Weeks of secret talks, coded briefings, whispered deals would culminate in the unveiling of a political giant.

Instead, this was a badly-rehearsed amateur production. The Reform Party had cast Robert Jenrick, the Conservative Party’s shadow Justice Party, as a redeemed hero. Having seen the light of the Tories’ duplicity and ineptitude, he would now be arm-in-arm with Reform’s leader Nigel Farage.

But Jenrick wound up as the court jester. On the eve of the show, he was sacked by Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch after “irrefutable evidence” that he was plotting to defect to Reform.

The veteran politician had left his communications plan on a photocopier, the equivalent of leaving your personal diary open on the Tube. He staggered into the Reform press conference denying htat he had been fired, claiming he had “always planned” to jump ship having suddenly discovered principles.

Jenrick had plotted a resignation with the suspense of a Netflix thriller. He gave us a primary school’s awkward play. Rather than crossing the floor, he tripped over it.

He was laughable not because of his defection. These have become depressingly routine among ex-Tory Ministers. Having read “The Guide to Reinvention” — a tome authored by Liz Truss, the UK’s shortest-serving Prime Minister at 45 days in 2022 — they have decided that 14 years of Tory Government, in which they took part, had brought Britain down.

Jenrick did not join Reform because of a sudden ideological epiphany. After years of ambition within the Conservative Party, he had nowhere else to go with Badenoch’s stature growing as leader.

More importantly, his move underlines a deeper truth about Reform UK: this is not a party of coherent ideology so much as a collection of grievances, ego projects, and political leftovers. Reform UK is quickly becoming the political equivalent of a pawnbroker for ex-ministers.

Let’s remind ourselves who this motley crew are:

  • Nadhim Zahawi, a former Chancellor who couldn’t explain his own tax affairs;
  • Lee Anderson, suspended by the Conservatives for racism but reborn as Farage’s hype man;
  • Nadine Dorries, who spent more time auditioning for Reform’s channel GB “News” than doing her job as Culture Minister;
  • Jake Berry, once Conservative Party chair, now clinging to relevance’
  • Andrea Jenkyns, who lost her Parliamentary seat and became a self-styled singer while moonlighting as Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire;
  • Marco Longhi, Ross Thomson, and Lucy Allan, political drones who were here yesterday, gone today, and “principled” once their careers stalled
  • Ben Bradley, turfed out as an MP in 2024 and jumping ship for a political lifeboat;
  • Last but not least, Jonathan Gullis, who accused the media of having a “sick obsession” with the UK’s COVID death toll, sparking outrage and forcing a hasty apology.

Farage is assembling a fantasy team built entirely from players past their prime, which even then was not great. To think that these people once graced the party of Peel, Salisbury, Churchill, and Thatcher.

From Comedy to Satire

This is where the comedy turns to satire. Lee Anderson once dismissed Farage as a distraction. Dorries mocked him as a fringe personality. Jenrick recurrently suggested the Conservative Party needed to make Reform “redundant”. Yet here they are now talking about “broken Britain” as if they were not the ones who smashed it with a hammer from 2010 to 2014.

What should have been a moment of strength for Farage, with a former contender for the Tory leadership joining his ranks, feels like a symptom of fragility. Farage styles himself as the antidote to establishment complacency, but his party is filling up with the figures who were the establishment. Having fashioned a brand that appeals to frustration and disaffection, he has opened his doors to a cohort whose primary qualification seems to be that they were once employed by the party that fed that frustration and disaffection.

Reform said it would build a coherent alternative to the Conservatives and Labour Party. Instead, they have assembled a coalition of tdisappointed failures whose incompetence as Ministers will be front and center in Labour, Liberal Democrat, and Green campaigns again and again.

And now Farage has egos who want to be more than just a supporting member of the cast — will his own ego allow that? If politics is the art of managing people with competing ambitions, Reform now has a team full of chiefs but no Indians. When every recruit thinks they’re the natural leader, when each newcomer has spent years blaming everyone else for their failures, cohesion becomes a myth.

How Kemi Won

If everything is about personality and performance, if every move is about positioning rather than principle, then this latest act in the Reform-Conservative play might tell us more about Reform’s limits than its potential. If Reform want to be the party of serious change, it should start by being serious about whom they are signing up – and I have not even mentioned the racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, and the odd anti-Semite.

If anyone walks away from this episode looking stronger, it is Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. She did not hesitate or dither. While Jenrick thought he was scripting his heroic exit, Badenoch changed the locks to Conservative HQ. Less than 48 hours after participating in a Shadow Cabinet meeting, he was escorted off the premises like a disgruntled employee holding the cardboard box from his emptied desk.

In a week when British politics resembled a shambolic West End preview, Badenoch was the only one who looked like a competent director. Jenrick did not storm out in protest; he was shown the door. Farage did not get his matinee performance of Tory humiliation. Badenoch had exposed the plot, shut it down, and sent a message to anyone else with one eye on the exit: don’t try it.

So this Reform Party production may end in tears, rather than the tossing of roses onto the stage. Jenrick wanted to be a star, but Farage wants to be the boss.

And even if Reform still has only six of Britain’s 650 MPs, that makes for a crowded and chaotic stage.