Nigel Farage has topped off a day of Westminster intrigue by unveiling the defection of Robert Jenrick, perhaps the most effective communicator the Conservatives had left until he was purged from the party this morning.

Brexit pioneer Nigel Farage welcomed Robert Jenrick, who has sometimes been described as the de-facto leader of the Conservative Party for the way he overshadowed the elected leadership, to Reform UK on Thursday afternoon, warning any others from Labour and the Conservatives who may wish to defect have until May 7th to do so, when the window closes.

Former Conservative Party immigration minister and, until this morning, shadow justice Minister Robert Jenrick said he’d made no decision to defect from the Conservative Party before he was kicked out by leader Kemi Badenoch for being too close to the poll-topping Reform UK party today. Nevertheless, he said the country is in a truly desperate situation, and the Tory Party stands in the way of taking much-needed action.

Nigel Farage is “obviously” the right person to lead Britain back to prosperity and sound government, and anyone willing to put party politics aside would be able to see that, he said.

Reciting a laundry-list of failures damaging modern Britain, with everything from government failure to forced deindustrialisation, to the destruction of law and order and endlessly open borders, Jenrick said:

…it’s time for the truth. Britain is in decline. From 1970 to 2007, real wages went down by one third every ten years. Since then they’ve flatlined. At the turn of the millennium the average Brit was earning twice as much as the average Pole. By 2031, we are on track to be poorer. Outside London and the South-East, our economy is closer to Bulgaria’s than Germany’s. Today 18-30 year olds are the first Britons to earn less than their parents.

Noting the country is presently experiencing “the most profound change” to its population in history, Jenrick asserted that “net migration is 100 times higher in the 25 years after 1997, than in the 25 years before” and challenged “anyone to argue other than that Britain is completely broken. Those that came before us built a great country, the greatest country in the world, but we are set to lose it. We will for certain if this government is re-elected”.

Evidently this is a Reform defection that may never have happened. Farage’s Thursday afternoon press conference was supposed to be on local democracy and the Reform leader said that while he had been in talks with Jenrick, they were not more progressed with those with many other Conservatives and they had not yet actually got to the point of discussing a defection. Badenoch kicking him out of the party expedited matters, he said, noting she effectively handed him Jenrick “on a plate”.

Adding to the drama, when Mr Farage first called Jenrick onto the stage this afternoon, he failed to materialise. Apparently delayed to his own press conference, he appeared minutes later.

Jenrick, for his part, said it was painful to leave the Conservatives, where he has been a member his whole adult life and has many friends, but “our first loyalty must be to the country… both Labour and the Conservatives broke Britain… Labour started mass migration, but the Conservatives ramped it up”.

Jenrick had previously resigned from a Conservative government where he was immigration minister over the then-Sunak administration not going far enough to curb arrivals. Mr Farage specifically cited this resignation as a sign to him that Jenrick was sincere on wanting to reform border controls, even if the pair have publicly clashed in the past.

In his speech, Mr Jenrick eviscerated his former party and, remarkably, named key figures inside who he identified as having failed. In comments that even by the standards of the now regular flow of ex-Conservatives defecting to Reform are strident, he said:

… the Conservative Party is so compromised that it cannot speak for the country, it cannot opposed Labour’s madness. It is not fit for purpose… the party hasn’t changed and it won’t. The bulk of the party don’t get it, they don’t have the stomach for the radical change that Britain needs… If we don’t get the next government right Britain will likely slip beyond the point of repair. Everything is on this, everything is on this decision.

Top Tory Mel Stride was right to criticise Labour on rising taxes but was complicit on swelling the state himself, while Priti Patel “created the very migration system that enabled five million migrants to come here, the greatest failure of any British government of the post-war period”, Jenrick said.

More broadly, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch purging one of her most effective lieutenants — who has been so much the party’s top media performer for months many would be forgiven for thinking he was, in fact, party leader — before his reappearing in Farage’s stable hours later is the latest and greatest evidence that the great re-alignment of the British right has reached the point of no-return. Underway for more than a decade with then-Prime Minister David Cameron’s calling of a Brexit referendum meant to kill the Tory right for a generation, the long-effective broad coalition between the liberal wets and the sovereigntist dries that made the Conservatives has been crumbling.

What precisely would become of the Conservatives after 14 years of immigration and taxation lies has been, until now an open question. On one hand what has been the default party of government for the UK for centuries could have regrouped and bounced back, possibly with a short-term second-fiddle role to Farage’s Reform. Otherwise, it seemed possible it would split, with the wets going to their natural home the Liberal Democrats, or else wearing the skin-suit of the Tory party as a much-reduced rump, with the dries — who never had the same grip on the party machinery — destined to break away to form a new faction or go to Reform.

With the departure of Jenrick — very much the king of the Tory sovereigntists until today — that question now seems all but decided.

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