By Jerome O’Reilly | @NationalReilly

Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick has been sacked by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and subsequently joined Reform UK in an alleged effort to damage the Conservative Party. He has long been a thorn in her side since he lost the party leadership bid in 2024 to Badenoch by a clear margin, despite being the favourite to win.

Badenoch says she had "clear, irrefutable evidence" that Jenrick was "plotting in secret to defect in a way designed to be as damaging as possible". A shadow cabinet minister commented that Jenrick "left his resignation speech printed out and hanging around" and that "someone got hold of it".

Speaking after being introduced by Nigel Farage in a hastily arranged evening press conference, Jenrick says he first reached out to Farage in September, but stated that he "didn't know" if was going to defect. Farage said the deal was not certain until he was sacked by Badenoch, saying there was only a "60/40" chance.

Jenrick says he won't call a by-election in his Newark constituency and he now sits as a Reform UK’s 6th MP. Farage says he will not accept defectors after the elections in May, a claim that lies in some doubt given his eagerness to accept even Liberal Tories into the fold, such as Nadim Zahawi.

This is a seismic moment for the British Right. For the past year, Jenrick has been the most senior Tory to unashamedly park his rhetoric firmly in the Reform UK camp, with Labour and the Liberal Democrats often playing along with the theatre, accusing him of being a racist.

Many on the online right are also firm backers of Jenrick and seem eager either to follow him into Reform UK, or to wish-cast a master plan for a new ultra-right party with independent MP Rupert Lowe.

I welcome Reform UK’s pitiful actions today. It is preferable that their power-hungry charade is exposed for what it is sooner rather than later, after the appointment of yet another Tory establishment dropout figure.

But who is Robert Jenrick? He entered Parliament in 2014, after a career in finance. He was considered to be on the Cameronite left of the Party and campaigned passionately against Brexit, despite his constituency voting to leave. Jenrick quickly rose through the ranks, serving as Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury from 2018 under Liberal-Conservative Theresa May.

In July 2019, he was appointed Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government under Boris Johnson. His tenure was dominated by planning reform, local government finance and the government response to the Grenfell Tower fire. It was cut short in 2021 after he accepted that he had acted unlawfully in a planning decision involving the Westferry Printworks development, leading to his resignation.

He later returned to government, serving as Minister of State for Immigration from 2022 to 2023, where he supported and oversaw the disastrous Afghan resettlement scheme, for which Nigel Farage would later call him a "fraud" in August of last year.