What a day it’s been for those of us on the right of the British political spectrum. The first thing that happens, a decisive intervention by Kemi Badenoch, she sacks her Shadow Justice Secretary, Robert Jenrick. He’s out. A few hours later, he says that he has joined Reform, which is why she fired him in the first place. And when he went, this is what he said about the Conservative Party, that he’d only just left and of which he’d been a member since he was a 16-year-old.Betraying its principles, the Conservative Party betrayed its voters, its members and the men and women who elect me in Newark and Nottinghamshire. And let’s be very clear with ourselves, this didn’t just happen. It wasn’t bad luck. It’s because over time, most of the party in Westminster lost its way.So that was his analysis of why he had had to go, though he’d recently been saying that having stood recently for the leadership of the party. He wasn’t going to give up on it so easily.
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When the news broke, I thought that Kemi Badenoch was taking a risk because she was accusing Robert of something which, if the evidence wasn’t produced, could have rebounded on her. But she was also being very proactive.Terrible word in getting something done and showing strong leadership, showing that she had mettle and backbone, and that she was taking command of a situation before others took it out of her hands.Robert, of course, by then, joining Reform later in the day meant that no further evidence was needed. If he was about to go, he’d now gone, so she’d no longer needed to prove that what she was saying was true, that the story was true.She then had to look at the position where the Conservatives have lost a very important figure in the party. We lost Nadhim Zahawi earlier in the week, who has been a Chancellor of the Exchequer and party chairman but was no longer a member of parliament.Robert Jenrick, runner up in the leadership contest, a member of Parliament, former holder of high office and a very energetic campaigner. Somebody you see on your TV screens regularly, someone who’s up and down the country speaking at events, getting a message across.So Reform is now in a much stronger position than it was a week ago. That instead of looking like a one man band, in spite of the able people around Nigel, it looked as if it was Nigel and little more than that.It now has some big hitters from the Conservative Party. This is not without its downside. There are people who think that the Tories are terrible and has beens, dead wood, and that they want a new Reform that doesn’t become a sort of nursing home for former Tories. There is that risk.But on the other hand, you now look at Reform and think, well, Nigel Farage could put together a cabinet of 20 or so people who have had serious political careers, who understand how the country is run. So it is a big positive, in my view, for Reform. Kemi, on the other hand, has suffered a loss. But my goodness, she’s made the best of a difficult circumstance.It’s never good for a party when people are defecting, but by grasping the initiative first thing in the morning, by interrupting Nigel Farage’s press conference, which was a clever bit of political theatre, it put Nigel momentarily on the back foot. She managed to minimise the damage that was being done.I’m not saying there’s no damage, but think how much worse it would have been had Robert been able to do it on his own time scale, out of time and place of Nigel Farage in his own choosing. It would have been a much more damaging news day for the Conservative Party under those circumstances.She also got across the view that Robert had behaved badly, that whilst within the tent, he’d been plotting to tear down the tent, and that’s not a particularly good look. So Reform comes out of it well, the Conservatives limit the damage, but they are certainly damaged. And then you have the situation of what happens next, because I’ve been going on for ages about how the right needs to unite.We need to go into a general election with one party of the right, not with two parties. If we go with two parties in a first past the post system, we both lose. And then you have Zack Polanski in office, and then you have mad policies that make us cold and poor and utterly destructive. You continue with some Labour ministers and you see how successful they are currently.So it’s really important that the right unites. Robert made it very clear in his statement and answering questions that he didn’t want to do this, but I would say that is what people argue just at the point at which they have joined a new party. Nobody talks about deals until the deal is done. It’s exactly the same reason that Robert said he was going to remain a Conservative, because he couldn’t admit he was going to go until he went.So I think a deal does remain possible and it’s in the national interest. Indeed, I’d say further than that, it’s the duty of those on the right to come together. And if that means some of the left of the Conservative Party, of whom Robert was particularly critical or uncomfortable and go off to join the Lib Dems, that’s fine. Actually, we need a Conservative alliance that is genuinely conservative, because I’m sorry to confess that a lot of Robert’s analysis of what had gone wrong with the Conservative Party in government was actually true.There were some successes, as well as not to deny those with education, with Brexit, with dealing with the global financial crisis. But migration was out of control. Taxation end up the highest it has done in decades, and we didn’t seem to be doing conservative things. We allowed foreign courts to overrule us. So his critique was not inaccurate. But the reason for it is some people who have been in the party who aren’t very conservative.So actually, I own today as always, as always when I’m on GB News, speaking to my wonderful viewers full of beans about the future of conservatism, even if it hasn’t been the best ever day for the Conservative Party.
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