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Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch’s decision to sack her shadow justice minister, Robert Jenrick, due to his impending defection was not so much about damage control as the first shot of civil war on the right. With Mr Jenrick shifting publicly to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, the issue became less about party discipline and more about the Conservatives’ political viability. Mr Jenrick says he left because Britain is broken and the Tories refused to acknowledge their role in breaking it. His claim rests on a self-serving distinction: that the damage was done by a party he served, but not by him.
Despite her improving polls, Mrs Badenoch is still recovering from the devastating 2024 election loss. With ambitious colleagues coveting her job, she could not afford to tolerate dissent. By acting she exposed a deeper fragility in UK rightwing politics. Mr Jenrick was not merely a restless colleague but a plausible alternative centre of gravity. His embrace of hardline populism could attract Reform voters; he had support among party members; and he was ambitious enough to believe his moment had arrived. Mrs Badenoch calculated that delay, in such circumstances, could be fatal.
The Tories’ problem is not that senior figures talk to Reform. It is that enough of them now believe Reform offers salvation from extinction. More than a dozen former Conservative MPs have already signed up. Mr Jenrick is the first figure with real grassroots traction to have switched sides. Mrs Badenoch can claim she has inoculated the party against further infection. But removing Mr Jenrick highlights Tory disunity. The Conservatives’ survival is at stake. But so is the coherence of opposition politics. A right split between rival claims to authenticity offers voters noise rather than a credible programme – and dims the prospect of an effective government in waiting.
There are also downsides for Mr Farage. He increasingly looks less like an outsider. What is striking is how closely the two parties’ personnel – and increasingly their philosophies – are beginning to resemble one another. Acquire too many ex-Tories, and Reform seems like politics as usual. Whether voters can easily distinguish between Mrs Badenoch’s party and Mr Farage’s is almost beside the point, though the latter is still more extreme. The British right is now split between two camps competing for the same voters.
The risk for Mrs Badenoch is that she has triggered a change in the politics of the right that cannot be closed down by discipline alone. By defenestrating Mr Jenrick, she has forced Conservative MPs to confront questions they have postponed since 2024: where does power on the right now reside? Is Reform a threat to be contained or a vehicle to be joined, or bargained with? Once defection becomes plausible for a senior figure like Mr Jenrick, it becomes an option for others. That changes the calculus. MPs are no longer simply judging Mrs Badenoch’s competence, but weighing exit, accommodation or confrontation.
This does not end the drama. It starts four months of campaigning ahead of key May elections. This will put party leadership and survival up for debate – and every act of authority can appear as an escalation of a fight. The British right likes to present its current turmoil as a tragedy inflicted from without. But it is a self-administered wound. For more than a decade, Conservatives promised delusions – control without cost, growth without trade-offs, sovereignty without responsibility. When reality arrived, it was reality that was blamed. Reform is not a revolt against that failure, but its grim and logical outcome.
