\n<\/p>\n
F<\/span>our days before Robert Jenrick was kicked out of the Tories for planning to defect to Reform UK, he spoke \u201cat length\u201d with Kemi Badenoch on the phone about party strategy. The week before he had sat through a shadow cabinet awayday taking copious notes.<\/p>\n While the Tory leader had been aware for some time of speculation over her shadow justice secretary\u2019s future, she had no hard proof of his plans, so it was business as usual. That all changed just 24 hours after their one-to-one conversation.<\/p>\n On Monday, senior figures in Badenoch\u2019s office were sent screenshots of what one said was \u201cirrefutably\u201d Jenrick\u2019s entire resignation speech from what sources claimed was a mole in his office, along with the accompanying media plan.<\/p>\n His speech, which was double-spaced for easy reading, implored his fellow Tories to defect with him as their party had \u201clost its way\u201d, singling out senior figures such as Priti Patel and Mel Stride for criticism. He added that Nigel Farage was the \u201cright person\u201d to lead the country.<\/p>\n Despite all the rumours, the Tory leader\u2019s top team were still shocked by the betrayal. Jenrick\u2019s aides had been openly speculating at party events about when he would choose to defect.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was all presented jokingly, but of course it wasn\u2019t a joke. We all thought he would wait till May to see if he still had a chance to depose Kemi. But that became more and more obvious that that is not going to happen,\u201d one party source said.<\/p>\n Shortly after receiving the screenshots, a journalist who is close to \u2013 and trusted by \u2013 the Badenoch operation told the team they had heard from a close friend of Jenrick that he was definitely making the leap, sources told the Guardian.<\/p>\n Badenoch\u2019s senior aides were already aware that Farage was due to appear on the BBC\u2019s Laura Kuenssberg show this Sunday and feared he would drop heavy hints before announcing the defection the next morning, to maximise the damage.<\/p>\n They immediately told Badenoch \u2013 and advised her to sack Jenrick and kick him out the party. \u201cKemi was regretful; she wished we weren\u2019t in this position,\u201d one source said. \u201cBut she was absolutely clear and focused: Rob had to go.\u201d<\/p>\n There was no attempt to win over Jenrick. \u201cWe knew we had to act immediately. If we challenged him first, there was a risk of him going straight out and doing it anyway,\u201d a Tory source said.<\/p>\n Badenoch left it to her chief whip, Rebecca Harris, to phone Jenrick, a move which one ally described as \u201cdelicious\u201d. Speaking to Harris, the MP angrily denied he was planning to defect, one Tory shadow cabinet source alleged.<\/p>\n The Tory leader\u2019s ambush \u2013 a video message where she laid out the charges \u2013 was hastily recorded just before. She released her video just after 11am, timed to coincide with Farage\u2019s press conference in Scotland, knowing journalists would confront the Reform UK leader.<\/p>\n <\/span>‘Clear, irrefutable evidence’: Badenoch on Robert Jenrick sacking over ‘plot to defect’ \u2013\u00a0video <\/span><\/p>\n The video was also emailed out to all Conservative party members with a message from Badenoch, promising them they \u201cdeserve better\u201d than MPs who stand for the party and then defect.<\/p>\n Farage, at his press conference in Scotland, also seemed caught on the hop. \u201cIt sounds to me like she\u2019s panicked,\u201d he said of Badenoch, insisting there was no deal done with Jenrick \u2013 yet.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ll give him a ring this afternoon,\u201d he told journalists. \u201cI might even buy him a pint.\u201d Pressed on Jenrick\u2019s defection destination, Farage replied: \u201cCould be the Lib Dems? I don\u2019t know!\u201d<\/p>\n One former cabinet minister said Badenoch had acted swiftly in a way that Rishi Sunak should have done as prime minister while allies of Jenrick plotted against him in No 10.<\/p>\n Badenoch\u2019s team were euphoric to have got one over on her former leadership rival. \u201cJenrick\u2019s clever-dick people, they\u2019re not so clever after all,\u201d one senior Tory said.<\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s blown him up with his own grenade, very decisive, no pissing about, fair play to her,\u201d another added.<\/p>\n Condemnation of Jenrick from across the Conservative party was swift \u2013 and brutal. One Tory MP called him a \u201ccoward\u201d. Another said he was \u201ca traitor\u201d, dismissing him as \u201cruthlessly ambitious and unprincipled\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cJenrick was a snake in the grass in the Rishi years, you cannot trust him. There was so much deceit and dishonesty and leaking stuff to journalists from the people who worked with him. We never dealt with these people properly then. We should have bulleted them a lot earlier,\u201d a former cabinet minister said.<\/p>\n Even among some of her Conservative sceptics, Badenoch drew widespread praise for acting decisively. \u201cShe has got some cojones,\u201d one MP said. \u201cIron Lady with a titanium overlay.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s done absolutely the right thing,\u201d another senior MP said. \u201cPeople need to realise that she\u2019s serious, has the guts to sack people when they deserve it, that we have standards, that people who go that way can\u2019t come back, and that we are not a populist Reform-lite party.\u201d<\/p>\n Jenrick\u2019s star with the Conservatives has waned since the party\u2019s October conference, when Badenoch impressed MPs and the membership there, while he became embroiled in a racism row. Her performances at PMQs have improved, and her ratings have gradually crept up, encouraging some sceptics to stick with her \u2013 for now.<\/p>\n Jenrick went to ground. With the wind in her sails, Badenoch flew to Edinburgh to campaign for the Holyrood elections \u2013 taking in a quick whisky tour at the Johnnie Walker Experience with Scots colleagues. Sources would not divulge whether they raised a glass to Jenrick\u2019s sacking.<\/p>\n <\/span>Kemi Badenoch tastes a tipple during a whisky tour in Edinburgh.<\/span> Photograph: Murdo MacLeod\/The Guardian<\/p>\n But the breathlessness did not last long. Rumours began circling that Farage had, indeed, got a defection deal with Jenrick over the line.<\/p>\n The pair had begun talking as long ago as last September \u2013 the month after the Reform leader called him a \u201cfraud\u201d \u2013 and there were rumours of a lunch in December, while Jenrick dined recently with Reform\u2019s deputy leader, Richard Tice.<\/p>\n A scheduled press conference about Reform\u2019s plans for a judicial review of delays to local elections at the party\u2019s headquarters on the 24th floor of Millbank Tower, central London, later in the afternoon gave the opportunity.<\/p>\n Within moments of standing up, Farage confirmed the worst-kept secret in Westminster: that Jenrick was Reform\u2019s highest-profile defection yet. But he told the packed room the MP hadn\u2019t been planning to join Reform UK anytime soon and \u201cmight not have joined at all\u201d.<\/p>\n Twisting the knife, he told Badenoch: \u201cYou\u2019ve handed me on a plate the man that is by far the most popular figure [in the Tory party].\u201d He announced the arrival of his new recruit \u2026 but nothing happened.<\/p>\n For a very long two minutes \u2013 which one attender described as \u201clike the bride being late to her wedding\u201d \u2013 Reform UK appeared to have lost Jenrick. \u201cWouldn\u2019t this be a funny way to end this day,\u201d Farage said.<\/p>\n The mood of the room shifted away from Farage\u2019s jovial tone as Jenrick finally swept into the room and launched into an earnest speech about his political philosophy, waiting more than 20 minutes to even mention Reform or his new boss.<\/p>\n Railing against his \u201crotten\u201d former party, he laid into his former shadow cabinet colleagues Stride and Patel personally for causing failures in welfare and immigration \u2013 just as Badenoch had predicted from his leaked speech.<\/p>\n Jenrick looked uneasy as journalists repeatedly pressed him about his honesty and trustworthiness, insisting he had put aside his own personal ambitions to be Tory leader in order to help make Farage prime minister.<\/p>\n He was confronted with evidence that he had told a Telegraph reporter he would \u201cnever, ever defect\u201d just last Friday, and admitted that he had actually already resolved to defect some time before Badenoch sacked him.<\/p>\n Jenrick\u2019s longtime allies, Sam Armstrong and Jake Ryan, watched from the sidelines, while Reform figures James Orr and Tice, in the audience, nodded along to his claims that \u201cBritain is broken\u201d.<\/p>\n But one notable absence was the party\u2019s policy chief, Zia Yusuf, who has previously expressed contempt for Jenrick for being a \u201ctraitor\u201d over his actions as immigration minister. Farage admitted Yusuf was suspicious of former Tories who had been in government \u2013 a sentiment no doubt shared by many in Reform.<\/p>\n Later, it emerged that Jenrick had been delayed because he had got lost in the corridors of Millbank Tower, getting stuck one floor below the press conference location after failing to find his way up the stairs.<\/p>\n He will be hoping to now navigate Reform\u2019s labyrinthine politics with greater success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Four days before Robert Jenrick was kicked out of the Tories for planning to defect to Reform UK, he spoke \u201cat length\u201d with Kemi Badenoch on the phone about party strategy. The week before he had sat through a shadow cabinet awayday taking copious notes. While the Tory leader had been aware for some time<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41824,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[11299,22192,8703,9321,2324],"class_list":{"0":"post-41823","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics","8":"tag-clever","9":"tag-defected","10":"tag-ejected","11":"tag-jenrick","12":"tag-robert"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41823\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/41824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}