Like yesterday was it was box office. Like in Westminster terms this was box office, But if this was a divorce, this is basically like a posh episode of EastEnders. Who's the one group of people that Nigel Farage does not particularly like having in his parties? Ambitious people. And you even saw in the press conference he was giving those nervous little Robert, don't you dare do anything.
The rule seems to be that you the one thing you can't do is is question Nigel or challenge Nigel because he will then come back and and and finish you off. Hello and welcome to the forecast. It has been quite the week in Westminster. A sacking, A defection and a deepening crisis on the right. Robert Genrick's move to Reform has capped off a dramatic few days for the Conservatives.
While Nigel Farage has celebrated the moment, calling it a historic realignment of centre right politics in the United Kingdom, the Prime Minister has described the Conservative Party as a sinking ship. Genrick himself has said his defection will unite the right. So what does this mean for the future of the Conservatives? And what does Genrick's defection mean for Reform? Is there a real possibility that Reform could win the next
election? Here to unpack the latest of the deputy editor of Conservative Home, Henry Hill, and our senior political correspondent, Paul McNamara. Thanks very much, both of you, for for joining me, Paul. First, the party line from the Tory leadership seems to be we're better off without him. You know, like when you're a teenager and you're dumped. I didn't want to go out with you anyway. Are they right? I mean, God love them, they are putting on a good spin.
But in if this was a divorce, this is basically like a posh episode of EastEnders. Kimmy's kicked out Bobby Chris, he's found out he's having an affair with No, he's bloody hell. They've turned up to the Queen Victoria and now they're shaking up together and he's slagging off everyone in her family. And he never really loved her anyway. This is like yesterday was it
was box office. Like in Westminster terms, this was box office and the start of the day was a desperate bid from everyone to try and get up on top of the of the headlines. And Kemi did like she did a a great job. I don't know what you're experiencing from everyone that you were talking to the Conservatives, but it didn't actually play the blinder first, first thing in the morning. But did it look like that later on?
That's the question, I suppose. I mean, I, I, I think that, yeah, broadly speaking, Kemi Begnock has strengthened her position in the party partly because her main rival has left it, but also because she played yesterday broadly very well. She acted decisively. If the if the defection was going to happen, then it's she has minimised the damage. She took the wind out of their sails. If there was any chance of anyone following Robert, that
seems less likely now. But I do think I'd be interested to see what would happen if a politician tried just admitting that something wasn't great and that they were sad that it. Happened. Stayed in their party. Well, well, no. Or, or if somebody left admitting that they were a loss, right? Because frankly, if if you're if you're Kimmy Babenok and you have such a low opinion of Robert Denrick, why was he your shadow justice secretary, right? Like he was indisputably 1.
The most popular shadow cabinet member with the grass roots 2 really an influence on her own policy thinking since she has adopted his policy on the European Convention on Human Rights. And three, one of the few members of the shadow cabinet who've had any luck getting into the media in a very unpromising media environment for the Conservatives. Now if he was planning to defect, you can still be like well you know better.
It were done quickly and all the rest of it, whilst acknowledging that having a senior member of your shadow front bench leave the party to go and join what is in parliamentary terms, a much smaller party is a bad thing. But that's not how this really works. Everyone has to immediately, the moment somebody leaves me like, well, I never liked them anyway.
And and we're all just supposed to ignore the fact that they have promoted them and given them senior positions and all the rest of. It, I mean, it's a similar, sorry, it's a similar argument, isn't it, that they are putting to Genrick, Robert Genrick that if you were so unhappy, you know, he's, he was brutal and named colleagues in his speech. If you were so unhappy, why don't you stay in and tell us?
Well, so I, I think my suspicion there is that actually, and this is a bad thing for British politics in general and it doesn't just apply to the Conservative Party, is that there really isn't, if ever there was space in political parties for that to happen. Because especially if you look at the way that Kimmy Bade not ran the leadership, and this is very specific, but she ran as the unity candidate, right?
And then she populated her shadow cabinet with lots of people who were previously in the cabinet from various wings of the party. That makes having a full and frank interrogation of what went wrong over the past 14 years very difficult. If you're overriding priority is not to alienate or embarrass anybody. And I think that the rise of of social media and and the media's appetite for and and expectation of information also doesn't
help. I remember during the Tory leadership contest, I can't remember which show it was on, but the host said to me, you know, we watched some clip or other and said, yeah, isn't the Conservative Party talking to itself? And my response was, is having a leadership contest, to whom should it be speaking? All right, this is when it's supposed to be working out what it says to everyone else. But everything was being examined through that external lens.
And I think that it's unfortunate that a lot of what Robert Jenrick said in his criticisms of the Conservative Party, there's a lot of truth to it, but he clearly felt that he couldn't. There wasn't an adequate forum for that inside the party. But there's what you say and there's how you say it, right? I mean, you can think all that and you can have a, a view that the party hasn't got it wrong. A lot of people in the Conservative Party think exactly
the same. But then they're thinking that and they're saying it and then they're saying it in an absolute drive by and chucking grenades left, right and centre and kicking the dog on the on the way out. Which is, I mean, that press conference was it, it was, it was quite something. There was no holding back there. That wasn't just I'm done with you, you guys have got it wrong and I move it on. I mean, Danny Kruger left. He's done it in a far more reserved fashion.
Robert Generate left and it was, I mean, it wasn't in the manner in which he wanted to. Like there was a choreography there that he wanted and he gets found out and it doesn't happen like that. He was setting fire to the house on the way out last night. I think that both Kemi and Robert could have benefited from being a little bit more like Danny. What did? You What did you think of Kemi's video?
The the one the. One in the morning when yeah well, I I and a couple of other journalists I spoke to because of the blurred background and the fact that it wasn't professionally. My first thought was is this real yeah, AI right I was just like I just want to check is this actually happening yeah and it. And then it turned out that it was. And I think that clearly, because the Conservative Party does have access to production, right?
It does have a proper camera and a set up and a set for her doing things. And so I think the fact that that was how it was delivered suggests that if this smoking gun came to light, it probably came to light quite quickly. Yeah. And they. It's like it. Was done at home.
Wasn't it? Yeah. And they really felt that they had to, you know, get it is a little bit like, you know, that that clip, that that video from President Erdogan during that coup in Turkey when he was filming from the plane, there was a real sense of like, right, we've got to get on this as quickly as possible.
And in fairness, it did work. And I suspect that even if he hadn't been planning on doing it before, one of the reasons that Jenrick was so vociferous in the press conference is because he and Nigel Farage needed some way to try and claw back some of the points for the day. When despite the fact, you know, it's remarkable and that despite the fact that the loss of Robert Jenrick and the loss of a member of the judder cabinet is objectively a very bad thing for the Tory Party.
The general consensus is that Kenny Bade not won defection day because of how she because of how she managed it and and, and she did manage it very well. So I think that's why they were pressing back. One, the thing that, you know, people in Reform were saying last night was, OK, yeah, she's done all right here, but the front pages tomorrow are all going to say that very senior Tories left to defect to Reform.
And lo and behold, every single one of the front pages is Robert James left and he's gone to Reform. It's not. Didn't Kenny do really well out of this? She did well and it's gone down. How she performed yesterday and how she bought by the horns has gone down well with some Conservative members, some councillors, a lot of her MPs, but ultimately the big story. But what about the fundamental issues you say? It was utterly damning about the Tories, wasn't it?
It was saying, you know, Britain is broken, broken and you've broken it. I mean, slightly ignoring how long he's been within the party itself, how damaging is that and how many people who remain in the Tory party will be thinking he's got a point here? Well it's a 2 edged sword because I, you know, there is a clear danger for Nigel Farage and being like the Tories cannot be trusted.
And if you don't believe me, ask any of the Conservative cabinet ministers that I've been pleased to welcome into my parliamentary party. But again, the danger that it is so dangerous to the Tory party because there is a lot of truth to it. And one of the people who acknowledged that historically was Kemi Batnock. During her leadership campaign. She didn't have any specific proposals. In fact, that was one of the dividing lines to do between her and Robert Jenrick.
But if you go back and you look at Kemi Batnock's leadership campaign, she is saying, why did we talk right and govern left? You know, we need a really deep interrogation into what went wrong. I'm an engineer and I know how to do that. And then it didn't happen and it still hasn't happened. And you know, when Priti Patel went out on, on, on the media and asked to be thanked for the
Boris wave. And you know, there's like, well, OK, if you're going to be, if you think that the level that immigration got to under the Conservative Party is a problem that you need to fix, having somebody in your shadow cabinet who thinks it's something that's praiseworthy is probably something you should fix. Again, nothing happened because
of that imperative of unity. So it it is a very difficult thing for Kemi to do now because she didn't get a mandate for any of these big changes in her in her leadership pitch. So so where did the strategist go now, given what happened
yesterday? Because you've got this slight contradiction that Kemi Bednock has started to do better, that it's widely being said that she did well yesterday, and yet you have all of these problems identified by Robert Jenrick with potentially many people within the party agreeing with him. I. Think the strategist is still trying to figure this one out?
Emy's complete right? One of the problems that the Tories have got now is that if you ask most people in the street to name anyone on the Tory front bench, I don't think they're coming up with a particularly long list for you. There aren't many people in the three front benches that have name recognition that that are proven media performers that can get out there, that can sell their message.
Robert Genrick was doing that. Whether you agree with him or disagree with him, he was someone who was doing that, doing that messaging for the Conservative Party. One of the things that the Tories have already started saying and Labour and Lib Dems have already started pointing at, start pointing at Reformers saying oh look, it's either Tories 2 point O or it's the Tory B team.
I think what a lot of people they are set within the Westminster bubble sort of forget is that most people are not us and are not looking at the news day in day out. Most people are getting on with trying to pay their bills and they're not looking at the psychodrama of all of these things. It matters a lot to all of us. It matters a lot to Tory party members and people who write
their campaign day in day out. Most people don't engage with politics until the six months before an election. So all this that goes on and you say, oh, look, they've got Jonathan Gullis now and they've got Marco Longy's. You know, no one knows who many of these people are. So as much as you say, oh, it's, it's all the Tories.
If it's Tories that you don't know and you haven't really heard of and you haven't engaged with since the last election five years ago and you've forgotten about, it's still really the party of Nigel Farage. And as long as he's getting out there and doing really well on the on the messing, that's really what is cementing itself in in people's minds. I mean, I, I think that's true
of a lot of them. I think that, for example, that it was a highway quite I, I, I was added an event with relatives who aren't particularly political and what they were saying on the day of that defection was, was he the tax evasion guy? So I think that there are which.
May not be the recognition he. Wants which may not be the, which may not be the recognition he wants, but but there's more than just optics, I think to this, which is that reform might actually end up governing the country potentially or in a position to govern the country. To do that it needs hundreds of people who are capable of being ministers, It needs hundreds of people who are capable of being at least possibly good MPs.
I'm not going to say very good MPs because, you know, none of the parties have a generally amazing threshold on that at the minute. And it needs people to presumably lead quangos, it needs people to lead regulators and there. Is to write laws. Exactly where The Who are the law officers going to be in a in a reform government? So actually I think one of the biggest structural challenges facing reform is the personnel
problem. There should be space in reform for hundreds of Robert Jenricks or people like him. But the the challenge has always been that, you know, generally speaking, if you're a very able person, going into politics involves making some big sacrifices, at least in the short to medium term. So who are the people who make those sacrifices? Well, they tend to be ambitious people. Who's the one group of people that Nigel Farage does not particularly like having in his
parties? Ambitious people. And you even saw in the press conference he was giving those nervous little Robert, don't you dare do anything. It's like if that's what you're doing on day one at the press conference where you unveil this person, that suggests that this is a really quite deep structure. So he may not be a shoe in for a reform chancellor Post I Mr. Degenerate we've got we've got, I mean, they've got absolutely
no idea. But generally speaking, the rule seems to be that you the one thing you can't do is is question Nigel or challenge Nigel or over shadow Nigel or even on at least one memorable occasion, succeed him by agreement because he will then come back and and and finish you off. So to the extent to it. Interestingly, Robert represents the 1/3 of the Reform parliamentary party that were ministers in Rishi Sunak's government. But no, I don't.
It will be interesting to see how Farage handles him. Because if Farage can't accommodate 1 Robert Jenrick, he has no prospects of accommodating enough talented people to make. As you say that he needs more Robert Jenricks. He means more. He needs more Robert. Not necessary from the Tories, but just in general. But but the but Tory defections specifically, it is a double edged sword, isn't it? Because you start to look as you say, like Tory Party 2.0 or a
sort of Poundland Tory party. But at the same time, you need that experience and you need people to come across, surely. You do. I almost wonder that. So whenever anyone talks about defections, about how this is going to go down, everyone talks about MPs and what's happening in Parliament, who's going to be the next person to to walk the floor? And everyone talks about voters when it comes to an election and who they're going to vote for.
But what always gets missed is the bit in the middle. And this is like your grassroots membership and parties live and die by their membership because as much as you can have someone being a media performer and doing great and it comes through an election, when it comes through a local election, any election, you need people who are willing to walk the pavement
for you and knock on doors. And the real detrimental effect I think here, and this is the thing that's worrying people, isn't necessarily in peace, but it's memberships, it's counsellors, it's OK. Well, maybe you're not going to have a whole lot of Tory members who go and join Reform, but are they going to turn up on a rainy Tuesday night to go and a knock on a door for you? And if they don't, well, your vote's going to, your vote share is going to go down.
If they don't do it in the local elections, are they going to do it come the general election for your MP and all of a sudden you get this degradation in support and it's very hard to win any election when you don't have those grassroots numbers. So when you look more broadly at the sort of, you know, Nigel Farage talks it about, you know, realigning the right of British politics, where has that been left?
So the spectre that's haunting the right is the spectre of Canada after 1992. So in 1992 the the Canadian right split actually on much the same lines that we have. The other party was even called Reform and the Progressive Conservatives, which were the big Tory party in Canada, went down to two seats. And even though they went down to two seats, it still took a decade for those parties to unite into the Conservative Party of Canada, after which
point they won. But for that decade the Liberals had some very, very easy election victories because despite the fact that you had two fairly sizeable right wing parties, each of which got a respectable vote, they hated each other and therefore there was no prospect of forming a government. And I think that that is something which both sides are very aware of.
But the difficulty of it is that actually there is quite a lot of bad blood, especially at the senior level between Reform and the Tories. But also neither of them have policy programs yet. So they've got nothing to build a coalition around. And that's why I think we keep seeing their differences emphasized because until they have discrete things that they stand for, the only thing to talk about to their divisions, because otherwise there's no
point having two of them. So does the right in this big mass rely on Labour continuing to U-turn, to make mistakes, to look weak? Today. I was thinking this yesterday. Remember there was that thing a couple of months ago where some people would make the point that Keir Starmer has the reverse Midas touch, where everything he touches turns to something not great. Keep it clean. Keep it clean. I've seen this yesterday. We started the day yesterday.
The new story yesterday was that Elon Musk was all of a sudden making big changes to Grokken. This was a a win for Downing Street. I was interviewing West of the street yesterday morning and he was like absolutely, Prime minister's played a blind on this one. This is a win for Downing Street where where, you know, no one has taken it to Elon Musk like we have. Elon Musk wasn't being verbose like he like he normally is. Two hours later, no one is talking about that story.
Got zero coverage yesterday evening. Keir Stammer couldn't even get a day's worth of news cycle out of that one good story, because all of a sudden events turn against him and the whole of the top end of most news programs and the front pages of every single newspaper was this story. It was the conservative. It was reform. And an interesting thing about reform because for understandable reasons people tend to to treat reform in the Tories as the two right wing parties and focus on the
internal dynamics of the right. But actually, if you look at Reform, they came second in 98 seats in the general election, of which 89 are held by Labour, right? Labour is also the party in government making lots of unpopular decisions. And even the seats that Reform UK already has have actually sort of a much bigger level of sort of government spending. And if you look at Reform, the voters, they don't tend to be small state, low tax.
They're socially conservative, hardline on law and order, but generally quite in favour of public spending. One, it's going to be quite interesting to see how reforms senior leadership, all of whom are committed Thatcherites,
adapt to that. We've already seen Nigel Farage, for example, flip on the two child welfare limit, but two that suggests that actually at the next election, not necessarily at all future elections, the Tories and Reform might not be each other's primary target necessarily because there's quite a few seats in the South, the and the east and bits of the Midlands where Labour won because the
Tories went almost extinct. And you've got nervous Labour MPs with many narrow majorities which the Tories could potentially take back. And Reform have a very, very different map of where their primary attack seats are.
So there will be some places, and you were talking about earlier about grassroots activists, most as important as councillors because actually party memberships have drindled to almost nothing and there are now some very nervous Tory MPs in former heartland counties where there are more MPs than councillors after last year. So that will be a a
battleground. But actually I think that focusing purely on the idea of a Tory reform battle ignores the fact that both of them, their best prospects for growth in the next election, are taking chunks out of Labour. And Nigel Farage yesterday saying next week he'll be announcing A Labour defection. Yeah. I don't know whether that was a joke or not initially. No, and there's some movies about who that person is. If we paid you money, would you tell us?
Pay me money, Jackie, I'll tell you anything. Like Nigel Farage. Is the master at garnering headlines, and he's been. He's been amazing over the last six months about when nothing has been going on. He's been able to Jack up an event where the cameras turned up. He's been able to say something, do something and make it happen so that he dominates the
airwaves. Now that didn't quite happen in the sequencing which he wanted to happen with Robert Germet, but by Christ, they, they did it yesterday. On that point of Tories and and Reform at war with each other. It's quite funny talking to senior people in, in Reform then I, no, we're, we're, we're just taking them over. We're, we're, we're not even taking them over. We're just, we're just replacing them. That's it. It's almost like the Liberals in, in, in the early 20th century.
It's like, no, the Tories are dead. We're just taking them over. Well, some people come, you know, come over to us. They need to come to us now before the end of the first week of May. Otherwise they're, they're not welcome. But that's it. We're just, we're just in charge now. The other thing that Farrar has always been very, very good at is recognizing that as the leader of what is normally a small party is that he is at his most effective when the big parties are trying to do
something about him. And so, for example, during the UKIP years, he was always talking about, oh, I'm having, I, I've spoken to 9 Conservative MPs always, always having these conversations. How many of them actually defected over that entire period? It was 2. But he understands, you know, and this was a big distinction between him and Richard Tice when Richard Tice was Reform leader, because Richard Tice would be like, we need to destroy the Tory party.
It's a great force for evil and all the rest of it. And if nothing else, that meant the Tory party wasn't going to try and adapt to you. And last time the Tory Party tried to adapt to Nigel Farage, it left the European Union. So he is very, very good at this. So I would not be surprised if I'm sure they might be a Labour defector. But Farage understands that it is entirely to his advantage to always have an ambiguous and a larger than real implied number of potential defectors.
So either of you expecting it it to be a a Labour MP or any Tory MPs to follow Robert Jenrick? It would be your biggest surprise if Fraser Reeves all suddenly turns around tomorrow, Says that's it, I'm off. I'm joining reform. That'd be that'd be a. Good watch. Who? I mean Shabana Mahmood. Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh, they'd. They'd love it. Oh, no, Yeah, that'd be great. But yeah, I've come to believe that Labour cannot deliver the immigration policy that Britain
needs. But no, I I've got shockingly conservative homes. Labour sources aren't all they could be. Looking ahead, predictions are always terrible. You know, you see how quickly things moved yesterday. The next big test is the is the local elections. Who will this play best for? I mean, on current polling reform, reform wildly outperformed pollster's expectations last time. The conservative polling is better, but not that much better
than it was a year ago. I think this is one of the reasons, the sort of the less cynical reasons for looking at why supporters Robert Jenrick are a bit jaded about the Chemi bounces it's being called, is that Chemi became leader in November 24 of a party on 25 points in the polls. She then took it to 17% and has now got it to 20%. And there there's a slight frustration that she's getting a lot of credit for this bounce when net Chemi is still -5
points from when she took over. And the, the, the devastating thing about that set of local elections last year, as I alluded to earlier, is the Tories, 2/3 of their counsellors and their counsellors are the overwhelming majority of their infantry. There are now large parts of England where there is functionally no conservative
ground machine. If that happens again, even it or anything like it happens again, even if it is slightly better than last year, even if the trajectory is gently upwards, you're just eating away at the thing that allows you to mobilize your vote. And if you're talking about high engagement voters who are prepared to turn out because of a national air war media campaign, those are reform
voters, right? The advantage, which is the structural advantage of the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, the big parties, is that they have the people who have the addresses of all their supporters and we'll go and knock them up three times and we'll drive them to the polling station if they want it. If that goes, then suddenly the fact that Reform has a fairly vestigial membership structure at all, even if it has a large number of nominal members,
counts for a lot less. So what do the Conservatives do to stay alive? To survive. I mean, you're probably the best one to answer this, but.
Did they change shape? I mean, so they have to, I mean, it's actually incredibly difficult because in the the in the short term, if you're looking at a survival general election, you want to avoid losing too many votes to the Liberal Democrats or prior to the election of Zach Polanski and the Greens going in a much left more left wing direction to the Greens because there are well heeled Shire seats where
that was a real danger. But essentially you need to try and find a way of reconciling is the fact that you're dependent on the votes of the over 50 fives who love public, lots of public spending on them. The fact that you are nominally a party of lower taxes who's meant to appeal to the economically aspirational, which requires you not necessarily taking all of their money to hose it at your existing voters.
And the fact that they do need to just public opinion has shifted very far on law and order and things like the European Convention on Human Rights. And I think one of the missed opportunities of the leadership contest, and one of the reasons that that that can be made not running as a unity candidate, maybe hit the snooze button on this, is that the party is paralysed by the fact that it's MPs fundamentally disagree on these questions.
And until they have that fight, there's a, there's a sort of, there's a tendency to elevate unity above everything else. But actually the party is divided. You can tell because it is almost incapable of making decisions and it needs to have that fight and someone needs to win. Look at the front bench of the Tory party. Do you look at who do you see
there? You think, OK, that's the person now who's going to be able to step up, fill the void on on on days when either they're not getting the coverage they want or they need to land a blow. This is the person that we're going to. Put there is there is they are currently auditioning for that position. There is not currently another Robert Jenrick. There are there are some who are better media performance. Claire Coutinho is very good, yeah, but.
She's been out a bit the last couple of weeks. She seems to he's learned Robert Jenrick's patented walking towards the camera video technique, one of the earliest adopters of the but she's currently in energy and important as that brief is in policy terms, it's not something that really lets you get the blows in on a day-to-day basis. They've put Nick Timothy in injustice now again, he was a Home Office spat for a very long time and obviously that intersects quite a lot with justice.
So on policy that might be really good is I've not seen much of him as a as a kind of frontline communicator. And This is why I think that the party would be better to be honest and recognise that Robert Generec is a loss to the party because actually it does not have very many people who are capable yet or at the moment of doing what he did. Paul, just to sum up, does this story mark a really significant turning point or a source of intense bit of psychodrama?
Might you say that is over and done with now? It's not over and done with. I think this will be seen as as a as a big moment. I don't think it will be seen as a turning point. It's really a marker of this is where momentum is going at the moment. And while there were some people who were thinking for a bit, OK, actually maybe reforms, the lead in the poll is, is is coming to an asset. Maybe it's slowing down. Oh, there's a bit of a chemi bounce.
She's done quite well the last little while. Maybe she's bouncing. Actually, no, the momentum is still very much on reform side. We'll be. Talking about it again, Henry Paul, thanks very much for talking to us. That is it from the forecast today. See you next time.