Jenrick Branded Shameless Chancer For Defecting To Reform

Robert Jenrick has been branded “a shameless chancer” after defecting from the Tories to Reform UK.

The former Tory leadership contender jumped ship just hours after Kemi Badenoch sacked him from her frontbench after seeing “clear, irrefutable evidence” of his betrayal.

That turned out to be a copy of the speech he planned to make announcing his defection, which was leaked to the Conservative leader by someone in Jenrick’s office.

In it, he said: “The Tories and Labour have forfeited the right to govern the United Kingdom. And the mantle now passes to Reform.”

It also emerged that Jenrick first held talks with Reform leader Nigel Farage last September, and since then has repeatedly denied he had any plans to defect to the right-wing party.

Labour chair Anna Turley said: “Robert Jenrick says the Tories broke Britain. Now he wants to do the same again with Farage’s Reform.

“He’s a shameless chancer who, like the other failed Tories who have scuttled off to Reform, are more interested in their careers than the country.

“With Jenrick in tow, Reform clearly wants to deliver the same chaos and decline he did while in government.”

After he was unveiled at a Westminster press conference by Farage, Lib Dem deputy leader Daisy Cooper said: “This was a conman introducing a charlatan. Robert Jenrick has an industrial-grade brass neck to be complaining about how broken Britain is, when it was him and his Conservative cronies who did such damage to our country and to trust and faith in politics.

“Reform and the Conservatives are two sides of the same coin. Right across the country it is the Liberal Democrats who are leading the fight to defeat them.”

Jenrick used the press conference to launch an astonishing personal attack on two of his former Tory shadow cabinet colleagues.

He said shadow chancellor Mel Stride “was the cabinet minister who oversaw the explosion of the welfare bill” when he was work and pensions secretary.

And he said shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel had “created the migration system that enabled five million migrants to come here”.

However, he praised both of them on X when he was still in the Tory Party.

A senior party source told HuffPost UK: “Knifing two colleagues like that is spectacularly bad form. I hope they duff him up in the lobby next week.”