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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is deputy editor of ConservativeHome.com
The path to political enlightenment has three stages. At the first, you take at face value the reasons politicians give for doing the things they do; at the second, you awaken to cynicism and attribute everything to smaller, less impressive and more human motives, such as cowardice or ambition.
And at the third stage, you realise that for any given political development both explanations can be — and usually are — true at the same time.
Robert Jenrick’s defection to Reform UK is a case in point. The former cabinet minister’s official reason is that the Conservative Party refuses, and may at this point be incapable of, a proper reckoning with its failures in office. The cynical explanation is that he’s an impatient pretender to the Tory crown whose intended victim, Kemi Badenoch, is rallying in the polls. They’re both correct.
Badenoch has rightly received plaudits for her handling of the whole affair. By acting so decisively and ejecting Jenrick from the party on Thursday morning, she took control of the narrative of the day and ensured that he made off with much less political capital than he might have.
But his departure is nonetheless a serious blow to the Conservative Party. Badenoch can be forgiven if she personally feels otherwise; the pond she rules is smaller than it was on Thursday morning but with the second-biggest fish removed from it, it might feel roomier to her.
Nonetheless, it is ridiculous to profess to feel no regret whatsoever about the loss of a man you were prepared to put in your shadow cabinet. If the voters take such statements at face value, they are well within their rights to question your judgment; if not, to feel that you might be insulting their intelligence.
This is true even on the most cynical reading of Jenrick’s actions, too. Critics are wont to dismiss him as an unprincipled opportunist who changes direction whenever it suits him. But the one thing a weathervane can be depended on to do is tell you which way the wind is blowing, and a useful indicator of the health of any institution is whether ambitious people are trying to get in or out of it.
Besides which, Reform UK is a questionable berth for a person with aspirations, at least above a certain calibre. If the grass seems greener on Nigel Farage’s side, it has been well fertilised by the careers of anybody who has challenged, overshadowed, or even in one case succeeded by agreement, the position of the supreme leader.
This is the biggest structural question mark hanging over Reform. Farage’s talents as a campaigner have been enough to take his latest party to the top of the polls and keep it there. But he could not govern Britain by his singular talents alone. If Reform is to become a governing party, it will need at minimum hundreds of able people to be MPs — and given the sacrifices entry into politics typically asks of able people, these will be ambitious, able people, Farage’s least-favourite sort.
Whether or not Jenrick’s defection turns out to be a watershed moment for the British right depends a lot on whether he can adapt his leadership style and allow Reform to grow into an institution big enough to attract those he would need to form a government. His decision to both unveil Jenrick and send a half-joking shot across his bows at the same press conference suggests this hasn’t happened yet.
Unless he takes over from the Conservatives by doing this, both parties might be about to endure the fate suffered by the Canadian right in the 1990s, when the Liberals enjoyed a string of very easy victories because the two rightwing parties disliked each other very much and neither had the courtesy to die.
Perhaps such rivalry and splintering are inevitable, however unhelpful they might be. The space for private internal dissent, so essential to the sanity of any big-tent organisation, is disappearing. New media makes the once-secret recesses of the political machine much more visible, while journalists with 24-hour news cycles to fill are ever vigilant for evidence that a party is not “united”.
The result is that parties no longer have the space to have the — sometimes ugly — internal battles they need to have. At one point during the last Tory leadership contest I was asked if the party was “talking to itself”. This was presented as a self-evidently bad thing, but my immediate response was: it’s having a leadership contest — to whom should it be speaking?
Whatever the balance of Jenrick’s motives, I believe that a frank interrogation of the Conservatives’ failures has not happened because it would cause a row. And it is a sad thing, not merely for the Tories but for British politics in general, if the only way to take aim at deserving targets is to shoot them on your way out.
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