Nigel Farage’s Reform Party has landed its most significant defection to date: former Conservative Party MP and Shadow Cabinet Minister Robert Jenrick. If you’re a Farage fan, you might think this sounds like a good thing. But as someone who considers Farage a personal friend and mentor, as well as a future Prime Minister, I urge him to exercise extreme caution with so many Conservative Party (Tory) members now flooding Reform.
In 2014, when Robert Jenrick was first elected at the Newark by-election (special election), I commissioned a piece by one of our Breitbart London columnists, Alex Wickham, now the Political Editor of Bloomberg UK. Wickham, then a libertarian-right-leaning gossip blogger, identified some critical flaws in the man he labelled “Robert Generic.”
Jenrick, he argued well, represented a special kind of carpetbagging, establishment politics. He paraded around with the likes of former Chancellor Ken Clarke, who to this day speaks only vituperatively of Nigel Farage and the Brexit movement. He lived in multi-million-pound dwellings in London, rather than the constituency in which he was running. And perhaps worst of all, he wholeheartedly endorsed David Cameron and George Osborne’s Conservative Party platform – the spark that lit the fuse of how and why Britain is in such dire straits today.
Naturally, Jenrick won. Beating off stiff competition from Farage’s then potential Member of Parliament, Roger Helmer, who himself had left the Conservative Party three years prior, in 2011.
Robert Jenrick, to my knowledge, is no Roger Helmer. He opposed Brexit in the 2016 referendum and has been widely ridiculed for championing the Conservative Party’s weak immigration policies.
Jenrick’s motivations for drastically altering his public platform over the past few years are more likely borne of frustration at bleeding votes to Farage’s Reform and at losing the 2024 Conservative Party leadership election than a more Helmer-esque philosophical consistency.
Indeed, old Generic has recently been badmouthing Farage, with the Reform leader appearing all too happy to throw it right back at him.
Just eight months ago, Jenrick told TalkTV’s Julia Hartley-Brewer: “I want to put Reform out of business. I want to send Nigel back to retirement.”
I believe this part of Jenrick will never change. Unable to oust Tory Leader Badenoch, he will undoubtedly make a run at Farage when he feels the time is right. Farage has been through this a dozen times in his career. I personally helped him put down several internal coups within UKIP, and I’d be more than happy to swing the axe again in case Jenrick (or anyone else) gets lairy.
One month prior, Farage had told Sky News: “Don’t forget… this is Robert Generic. This is Robert the Remainer. This is the Robert the ‘I don’t stand particularly for anything at all’ who suddenly appears to be … on this Damascene conversion.”
That was the astute reading of the man. Today’s embrace of him into the Reform Party is the astute realism of a Nigel Farage whose entire political strategy often hinges on just one word: momentum.
Farage’s embrace of Jenrick isn’t an endorsement of the man, or of his sudden Damascene conversion. It’s a daring — and dangerous — tactic in his three-decade war against the Conservative Party machine.
He should exercise maximum caution with politicians like Jenrick, Zahawi, and Dorries. These aren’t just converts. They’re also potential infiltrators. And they’re exactly the sort of people you never turn your back on. Not for a second.
