A traitor has been banished – but Jenrick sacking could haunt Tories

In Tory world, only the paranoid survive. Ever since she narrowly defeated him for the Conservative leadership, Kemi Badenoch has been waiting for Robert Jenrick to come after her. For most of her time in the job, all the chatter in the blue tribe has been about when he would make his move to take her crown.

His disdain for her leadership has been barely disguised. Viral social media posts and interventions ranging well beyond his portfolio brief have had all the hallmarks of an incipient challenge. He has sounded notably warmer than she has towards the idea of some kind of Tory-Reform electoral pact.

So it was both rational and ruthless for the Tory leader to launch a pre-emptive strike against her rival when the opportunity presented itself. She has not only sacked Jenrick from the shadow cabinet, but thrown him out of the Conservative parliamentary party by suspending him from the whip. In a video message hastily recorded on Thursday morning, she asserted that she had seen “irrefutable evidence” that the MP for Newark has been “plotting in secret” to do the rat by jumping ship to Reform. That followed a telephone conversation between the two in which he protested his innocence to a disbelieving Badenoch before slamming down the phone.

Her aides say that the evidence includes a dinner last month between Jenrick and Nigel Farage. It is also claimed that Badenoch’s team got sight of a draft defection speech that included paragraphs in which Jenrick attacked Conservative colleagues. Incredible as that may sound, in my experience of the wacky ways of Westminster it wouldn’t be the first time that highly sensitive material has been left where it shouldn’t be for opponents to get hold of it. Ambushed by the news, Farage did not deny that he has been having “conversations” with Jenrick, while denying they were “on the verge of signing a document”.

Badenoch has demonstrated a clinical ruthlessness that will have plenty of admirers among Tories. Rather than wait haplessly to see what he would ultimately do, she seized the initiative. She looks sure-footed and decisive; Jenrick looks wrong-footed and diminished. If he does now defect, it will be a significant moment in the turbulent universe of the British right, but the shock value of a member of the shadow cabinet changing colours from blue to turquoise will be seriously diminished.

There is quite a lot of risk for her too. Jenrick is popular with Tory members, who have regularly placed him top of Conservative Home’s league table of the shadow cabinet members most admired by the party’s activists. To any voters paying attention to this latest spasm of blue-on-blue, it will be reminiscent of the endless infighting and self-indulgent psychodramas of the Tories’ time in government. That played a major role in alienating them from the electorate.

Farage’s admission that he has been playing footsie with Jenrick also raises questions about Reform’s strategy. Lack of ministerial experience is one of the biggest obstacles to Reform UK looking like a credible party of government. But enlisting former Tory MPs badly undercuts its core message, especially when the recruits – Nadhim Zahawi being a recent example –come hauling more baggage than the Heathrow luggage belts on a Bank Holiday weekend. The danger for Reform is that it looks more and more like a refugee camp for discredited Conservatives than it does the insurgent force for change that it claims to be.

Photograph by Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire