It's not going well inside Reform...
While Nigel Farage may be more than happy to accept another failed senior Tory who helped wreck the country among his party’s ranks, not everyone in Reform is happy about their latest recruit Robert Jenrick.
Jenrick became the latest high-profile Tory to defect to Reform, which claims to be an anti-establishment party but which has now welcomed more than 20 former Tory MPs into its ranks.
In a day of turmoil for the Conservatives yesterday, party leader Kemi Badenoch announced that she was sacking Jenrick after uncovering ‘clear, irrefutable evidence that he was plotting in secret to defect in a way designed to be as damaging as possible to his shadow cabinet colleagues and the wider Conservative Party.’
One shadow cabinet minister claimed Jenrick left a printed copy of his resignation speech lying around, “like something from The Thick Of It”.
Yet less than a fortnight ago, Reform’s candidate for London Mayor, Laila Cunningham, made clear that she did not want Jenrick in Reform, saying that he had played a key role in the Tory government’s failures.
The Telegraph reports Cunningham telling the paper’s podcast that she blamed Mr Jenrick, the Tory shadow justice secretary, for allowing migrant hotels to “flourish”.
She said: “It was under him [Jenrick] that the hotel migrant situation flourished. You know, we had a peak amount of hotels.”
Cunningham also said she felt that the Conservatives had failed to atone for their sins.
Are set for an internal Reform war over their latest recruit?
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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