Newly surfaced remarks to Tory activists show Robert Jenrick thought Reform could blow up or become a dire threat that blocked the Conservative return to power
Robert Jenrick’s defection to Reform UK at the start of the year was a political earthquake, but a newly surfaced recording shows he believed Nigel Farage’s party had the potential to challenge the Conservatives as the “standard-bearer of the centre-Right”, back when he was fighting Kemi Badenoch for the Tory leadership. Long before Reform UK surged in the polls to first place, Mr Jenrick set out how the start-up party could stop the Tories returning to power. But in candid remarks to Newbury Conservative activists, he also described how Reform could collapse into conflict and vanish from the political field.
The Newark MP said: “[Reform] might just disappear, they might peter out, they might all start hating each other and Nigel Farage might, you know, p*** everybody off in the party.”
However, he said he did not want to “bet the house on that because the opposite could also be true”.
The former immigration minister said: “They could build on this and they could fight us to be the standard-bearer of the centre-right in British politics. So, I think we’ve got to take it very seriously, and we’ve got to try to bring those people back to us.”
He said Reform’s performance in the 2024 election – in which it won 4.1million votes and saw five MPs elected – was “an absolutely critical factor in our defeat”. And he warned that Reform could stop the Conservatives repeating the long journey back to power that it made after the 1997 Labour landslide, noting that then “there wasn’t anyone else competing to be the voice of the Right
The remarks – understood to date from August 2024 – give a unique insight into the mind of one of the most ambitious politicians of his generation. Reform did not draw level with the Conservatives, according to Politico’s poll of polls, until December 2024; it would hit a high point of 31% in the polls in July 2025 and has remained in first place since.
In the event with Newbury Conservatives, Mr Jenrick insisted their party was in his “blood” and that he was “first and foremost a member”, stating: “I genuinely believe that our party remains our country’s best hope.” He said it was a “wasted conversation” to try to persuade Mr Farage to join the Conservatives and cautioned against trying to “out-Reform Reform”.
But Mr Jenrick gave a scathing critique of his party’s record in Government, saying: “We need to be honest that we lost this election because we failed to deliver for the British public on some of the central questions facing our country. First and foremost, but not exclusively, was immigration.”
He said he did not seek to merge the Conservatives with Reform but wanted to “take all the Reform voters and bring them back home to the Conservative Party”.
“I think Reform has flourished because we have failed,” he said
Mr Jenrick lost to Mrs Badenoch by 12,418 votes in the leadership contest and served as her Shadow Justice Secretary. She sacked him in January, claiming there was “clear, irrefutable evidence that he was plotting in secret to defect” and he appeared alongside Mr Farage as Reform’s newest MP at a press conference hours later.
A Conservative source said: “Jenrick is a chancer who has only ever been out for himself. He doesn’t care about the country – just the next rung on the career ladder. It’s only a matter of time before he stabs Farage in the back – like he has everyone else.”
Attacking Mr Farage’s plans to make him Chancellor, the source said he lacked business experience, adding: “What does he know about the economy? He’s hardly set the world alight.”
Mr Jenrick told the Sunday Express: “The Tory party refused to apologise for their mistakes or change, so I left. Instead, they sneered at the millions of voters who left them for Reform UK and pretended it was everyone else’s fault. They’ve now been consigned to electoral irrelevance, so if Express readers want to stop Keir Starmer and Zack Polanski only Reform UK and Nigel Farage can do it.”
