Kemi Badenoch sacks Robert Jenrick for plotting to defect
Kemi Badenoch has sacked Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, for plotting to defect.
She has posted this on social media.
I have sacked Robert Jenrick from the Shadow Cabinet, removed the whip and suspended his party membership with immediate effect.
I was presented with 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.
The British public are tired of political psychodrama and so am I. They saw too much of it in the last government, they’re seeing too much of it in THIS government.
I will not repeat those mistakes.
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Key events
16m ago
Newark Tories back Badenoch’s decision to sack Jenrick, their MP
20m ago
Malcolm Offord, former Tory peer, says he won’t disclose his wealth, after being named as Reform UK’s Scottish leader
38m ago
Badenoch should publish evidence she claims to have that Jenrick about to defect, says former Tory cabinet minister
1h ago
‘This man is a fraud’ – what Farage said about Jenrick less than five months ago
2h ago
Starmer accuses Badenoch of ‘weakness’, saying Jenrick should have been sacked months ago for ‘toxic’ comments
2h ago
Labour chair says Badenoch has ‘lost control of party’ – while Labour MP praises her ‘strong leadership’ sacking Jenrick
2h ago
‘Treacherous’ Jenrick motivated to defect by ‘personal ambition’, Tory chair Kevin Hollinrake says
2h ago
Jenrick ‘completely out of his depth’ as minister, former Tory government colleague claims
3h ago
Evidence that Jenrick about to defect ‘totally irrefutable’, Tories say
3h ago
Farage claims he will announce Labour defection next week
3h ago
Farage claims Badenoch ‘panicked’, and that Reform UK was not planning to unveil Jenrick as defector later today
3h ago
Farage says ‘of course’ he has spoken to Jenrick, but Jenrick not ‘on verge’ of signing up to Reform
3h ago
Badenoch says Jenrick wanted his defection to be ‘most damaging’ to Tory party
3h ago
Kemi Badenoch sacks Robert Jenrick for plotting to defect
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Newark Tories back Badenoch’s decision to sack Jenrick, their MP
Newark Conservative association, where Robert Jenrick is MP, has issued a statement on Facebook saying it backs Kemi Badenoch’s decision to sack him. Keith Girling, the association chair, said:
Kemi Badenoch was absolutely right to take this decisive action when faced with irrefutable evidence that Robert Jenrick was plotting to defect in the most damaging way possible.
Jenrick has let down his party, let down the activists who campaigned for him as a Conservative MP, and let down the voters of Newark who re-elected him in 2024.
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Malcolm Offord, former Tory peer, says he won’t disclose his wealth, after being named as Reform UK’s Scottish leader
Severin Carrell
Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.
The multimillionaire financier who has been made leader of Reform UK in Scotland has refused to say how wealthy he is, claiming that is a private matter.
Malcolm Offord, formerly a Conservative party life peer, was unveiled by Reform’s leader Nigel Farage as the party’s first Scottish leader, 10 weeks before a Scottish parliament election where Reform is expected to win up to 18 seats.
Offord is an avid yachtsman who wins races at Cowes, collects classic cars and recently bought a mansion on the banks of Loch Lomond for £1.6m without a mortgage, and previously endorsed suggestions the public could be charged to use the NHS.
Speaking at a press conference in Kirkcaldy, Farage and Offord, who was appointed to the upper house by former Tory prime minister David Cameron in 2021, ceremoniously signed a letter stating Offord has “retired” as a peer in order to stand for Holyrood.
They acknowledged that Offord would remain a life peer since only an act of parliament can cancel a life peerage; Farage indicated they did not intend to apply to the king for such an act but said Offord would no longer attend the Lords or use the title.
Pressed by reporters on whether he would declare his wealth before the May elections, he refused to do so and declined to publish his tax returns. The convention at the Scottish parliament is for party leaders to do so.
“I’m not talking about my net worth,” he said. “That’s not of any relevance to anybody. For a start, it’s not something you pluck out of the air because your assets are not easily valued.”
Farage said Reform said would putting up 100 candidates in May’s election, to contest most of the 129 seats.
“We feel very confident that the list of men and women we put before the Scottish electorate will represent a very, very broad cross-section of working life in Scotland, people of real experience, not many professional politicians, amongst them,” he said.
Offord said those candidates were “real, authentic people” who included midwives, teachers, doctors and a procurator fiscal – a state prosecutor. “They represent Scotland at its grassroots in every part of this country,” he said.
The latest Scottish opinion poll, published by the political consultancy True North on Thursday and conducted by Survation, suggests Reform is neck and neck with Labour for second place, behind the Scottish National party on 34% of the constituency vote.
Survation estimated Reform was on 19% of the constituency vote, compared to Labour on 16%. On the list vote, Reform and Labour were tied at 18%. True North said those data implied the SNP would win 61 seats, less than an overall majority, with Labour and Reform tied on 18 seats.
Nigel Farage (right) and Malcolm Offord at their press conference today with a copy of the letter Offord had written saying he will no longer serve as a member of the House of Lords. But his peerage is not affected, and he remains Lord Offord. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The GuardianShare
The latest episode of the Guardian’s Politics Weekly podcast is out. It features Kiran Stacey and John Harris talking about Robert Jenrick’s sacking.
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Badenoch should publish evidence she claims to have that Jenrick about to defect, says former Tory cabinet minister
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former Tory cabinet minister who has not defected to Reform UK but who would like the Tories and Reform to form an electoral pact, has said that if Kemi Badenoch has clear evidence that Robert Jenrick was about to defect, she should publish it.
Speaking on the World at One, he said:
If the evidence is there, they should definitely publish it. I think that makes Kemi’s position extremely strong.
If it’s true that Robert was planning to defect and was planning to do so in a way that was damaging to the party, then removing the whip and removing him from a shadow cabinet is a reasonable thing for a party leader to have done.
If there isn’t any evidence for that, it’s an over-reaction, and I think it strengthens Kevin’s position if she reveals the evidence that exists.
In an interview earlier, Kevin Hollinrake, the Tory chair, said he had seen evidence that Jenrick was planning to defect in a “treacherous” way. (See 12.31pm.) It has been reported that this evidence was a draft resignation speech, but Hollinrake did not confirm that.
Given that the draft resignation speech is thought to be damning about Badenoch, then it is not hard to see why CCHQ is not publishing it on its social media account.
My colleague Jessica Elgot says the text was also damning about some of Jenrick’s colleagues.
Party sources say that Jenrick’s planned resignation speech included vicious criticism of shadow cabinet colleagues, including Priti Patel and Mel Stride.
In the past there has been speculation that Jenrick could defect to Reform UK in return for a promise that he would be chancellor in a Nigel Farage-led government. The fact that he has been sacked today makes this less likely, because his joining would no longer be a PR coup for Farage, and so he has lost much of the leverage he had to negotiate a decent job in return for switching.
Jenrick argues that the last Tory government failed on immigration, and so it is not surprising that his draft resignation speech included a passage criticising Priti Patel, who was home secretary when legal immigration soared.
The fact that he was also planning to criticise Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, may confirm suspicions that he fancies himself as a potential Reform chancellor. In a New Statesman article on Jenrick’s defection, Will Lloyd says:
Jenrick had told friends in recent weeks that he thought Reform lacked a viable economic spokesperson and an eventual shadow chancellor.
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Updated at 14.18 GMT
George Osborne, the former Tory chancellor, says that, if Kemi Badenoch thinks that sacking Robert Jenrick will end the Tory psychodrama (see 11.11am), she is wrong. Speaking on the latest edition of his Political Currency podcast this morning, recorded as the news was breaking, he said:
Is Kemi Badenoch forcing [Jenrick’s] hand or has her hand been forced because he’d already made his decision? She’s certainly saying she’d seen evidence he was about to defect. Then that is the proper beginning of the civil war inside [the] right about who is going to lead the right.
And what are Tory MPs going to do? Are they going to defect to Reform? Is the pressure going to grow to have an alliance with Reform? Or are they going to say, look, the Jenricks of this world can leave, but we think the future lies with the Tory party …
If [Badenoch] thinks the psychodrama is over, I’m afraid it’s just beginning.
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James Heale from the Spectator says some Reform UK members are not all thrilled about the prospect of Robert Jenrick joining the party.
Some unhappiness within Reform at the prospect of a Jenrick defection.
One councillor says: “While I personally like Jenrick. I can’t see how he could be defecting if Nigel had called him a fraud and said he wasn’t to be trusted. [See 1.15pm.]
“Yes, I think he could be an asset to Reform. But I cannot for the life of me understand why Nigel would be entertaining a man he personally called a fraud.
“It makes us look ridiculous. It’s bad enough when someone defects and has had a pop at Nigel or Reform previously, but it’s worse when it’s the other way round.”
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‘This man is a fraud’ – what Farage said about Jenrick less than five months ago
While Nigel Farage did not rule out accepting Robert Jenrick as a defector at his press conference this morning, he also suggested that Jenrick’s record in government might be a problem for him (see 11.38am) – although Reform UK has been happy to take other former Tories associated with policy failure.
But, only last summer, Farage was attacking Jenrick on social media because of his record as an immigration minister. “This man is a fraud, this man is not to be trusted,” Farage said in this video.
When Robert Jenrick was immigration minister he grew the number of illegal migrants living in free hotels to 56,000.
He is no friend of Epping. pic.twitter.com/E6HMry5AOX
— Nigel Farage MP (@Nigel_Farage) August 20, 2025
Around the same time, Farage also posted this on X.
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Keith Girling, a Conservative councillor on Nottinghamshire county councils representing a ward in Robert Jenrick’s Newark constituency, told PA Media he felt “totally betrayed” by the MP. He said:
I’m obviously very, very, very disappointed in Robert. I’m a great believer in loyalty and he’s shown a complete lack of loyalty there.
I think Kemi has done absolutely the right thing when she finds evidence of what he’s plotting to do. She’s shown real leadership there to sack him, kick him out of the party, and we’ll deal with the aftermath.
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And this is what Keir Starmer’s press secretary has said about Robert Jenrick at the lobby briefing this morning.
Robert Jenrick was the immigration minister in a government that presided over an open borders experiment, a health minister who left people stuck on waiting lists, and a Treasury minister during the worst decline in living standards on record.”
While Reform continues to welcome failed Tory retreads, this Labor government is putting the country back on track.
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Starmer accuses Badenoch of ‘weakness’, saying Jenrick should have been sacked months ago for ‘toxic’ comments
Keir Starmer has said that Kemi Badenoch should have sacked Robert Jenrick long ago for his “toxic” comments. On a visit in Scotland, Starmer said:
My question is: why did it take so long? Jenrick has been making toxic comments to try and divide our country for months, and months, and months, but it’s only now, when he’s on the verge of defecting to Reform, that Badenoch gets around to sacking him. So, that’s weakness on her part.
(For examples of what Starmer meant when he was talking about Jenrick’s “toxic” politics, you could start by reading his Tory conference speech this autumn.)
Referring to in general to Tory MPs defecting to Reform UK, Starmer said:
There’s a bigger story here, because we’re seeing a flood of Tory politicians, ex-politicians, going across to Reform because they know that the Tory party is a sinking ship.
Equally, from Reform’s point of view, you’ve got Nigel Farage who is welcoming these failed politicians into his ranks and building his party as a party of the Tory politicians who let the country down so badly.
There are now at least 24 former Tory MPs in Reform UK. There is a list of 20 of them here, and since it was published Ben Bradley and Zahawi have defected. The list does not include two Reform UK MPs, Lee Anderson and Danny Kruger, who were both first elected as Tories.
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