The Jenrick scandal is an earthquake in British politics

Britain was due a decent political storm. After the sleep-inducing scandal of whether Angela Rayner understands stamp duty, and the reheated controversy of Peter Mandelson’s ill-advised friendship with a paedo, we needed a crisis with substance. And in the war of words between Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, we have exactly that. Finally, a political stand-off that isn’t just psychodrama and backstabbing – though it is that – but also an electric shock to the body politic that tells us change is coming. Actually it’s here.

This is big. It blew up this morning when the leader of the Conservative Party, Badenoch, pushed out her shadow justice secretary, Jenrick. She withdrew the whip, sacked him from her shadow cabinet and suspended his party membership – ouch – after being presented with ‘clear, irrefutable evidence’ that he was secretly plotting to defect. What’s more, he was planning to go down in a blaze of media glory, in order to be ‘as damaging as possible’ to the Conservative Party. Badenoch scuppered his ‘screw you’ by outing him and then ousting him.

You don’t need to be a political nerd to know where Jenrick was going to defect – to Reform UK. Though Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, is for now keeping his cards close to his chest. ‘I never reveal private conversations’, he told journos this morning. This whole thing is an earthquake for the political right. It could be as consequential a defection for the right as the Gang of Four’s fleeing of Labour was for the left in 1981. It is proof, if more were needed, that the old two-party system is a busted flush, and the entirety of politics on these isles is now up for grabs.

The Jenrick storm speaks less to the dynamism of the man himself – as if – than to the spectacular hollowing-out of the Tory Party and the unstoppable rise of Reform. Badenoch says she nipped Jenrick’s defection in the bud because she believes the British public is ‘tired of political psychodrama’. With respect, Kemi, this is more than psychodrama. This is hard, structural evidence of the withering of one of the most successful parties of the entire democratic era – your party, the Conservatives. It confirms the Conservatives are no longer able to counter Reform or prevent their traditional support base from melting away. It feels, more than ever, like game over for the Tories.

Who knows what Jenrick’s motivations are. My guess is they are pretty cynical. He strikes me as a weathervane in human form. He’s gone from being an acolyte of the studiously bland politics of the David Cameron set to basically a YouTuber who gets young fogeys hot under the collar by filming people leaping the barriers at Tube stations. He was a ‘Cameroon blandy’, according to one Tory adviser, who was cool with mass immigration and resolutely opposed to Brexit. Yet lately he’s styled himself as a peerless digital warrior against our broken borders and the ECHR. Will the real Mr Jenrick please stand up?

If he does slink over to Reform, it will be interesting to see how his ego copes with playing second fiddle to Farage. And how his Remainer heart will hold up amid a swarm of Brexit bruisers. Perhaps he really has changed. Maybe he really has woken up to the savage damage that ‘Cameroon blandies’ like him, alongside Labour Third Way-ists, inflicted on our kingdom with their elevation of technocracy over democracy, of the needs of a gold-collared superclass of globalists over the desires of ordinary Brits who want secure borders and strong communities. But in a sense it doesn’t matter. Jenrick’s name might be in the headlines but the real story here is Reform’s extraordinary vanquishing of the knackered politics of yesteryear.

Reform is now the Sun around which every other party orbits. That it has sucked into its orbit big-hitter Tories – Danny Kruger, Nadhim Zahawi and apparently Robert Jenrick – is extraordinary. But it goes beyond that. Reform’s gravitational pull is ripping whole chunks off the Tory Party, exposing the historic disarray beneath. Reform is why some councils are scandalously demanding the postponement of local elections – they fear Reform is what the people want, and they want to make sure they don’t get it.

Labour now defines itself almost entirely in opposition to Reform. ‘We’re not Nigel Farage’ is all that this soirée of social workers masquerading as a party has to say these days. And yet they lamely ape Faragist policies on immigration and crime in the forlorn hope that this will help them hold on to those working-class voters they’ve been defaming as ‘gammon’ for 10 years. Even Zack Polanski’s wacky Green Party, which has a modicum of momentum courtesy of the reactionary anger of the anti-Brexit, pro-trans middle classes, constantly postures against Reform for retweets.

The Jenrick storm is in essence an aftershock of the Reform phenomenon. A big aftershock, sure, but an aftershock nonetheless. Jenrick is not the author of this moment but a player in it. Like everyone else he feels the lure of a new politics, and more importantly of those vast swathes of society whose thirst for change manifested this new politics and drove Reform’s rise. The real story here isn’t Robert Jenrick – it’s us.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.