Those pondering why Robert Jenrick defected to Reform UK have focused on the political momentum of Nigel Farage or the performance of Kemi Badenoch, but the key conversation was the one he had with his father on Boxing Day.

‘He’s a very straight talker,’ Jenrick explains when we meet at Reform’s headquarters on Tuesday afternoon. ‘He said, “If you weren’t in politics and there was a general election to-morrow, which party would you vote for?” I said, “Reform.” He said, “If you weren’t in politics, weren’t a candidate, had no particular loyalty, who would you want to be prime minister if the choice was Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage?” I said, “Nigel Farage.” He said, “Well, be honest with yourself and become a Reform MP.”’

Three weeks later Jenrick did so, when Badenoch got wind of his intentions and flushed him out. Jenrick concluded that the Conservatives’ voter-targeting strategy means they can defend barely half of the 120 seats they won in 2024. ‘It has become apparent to me that the Tory party is pursuing a 60-seat strategy,’ he says. ‘It’s a party reconciling itself to being relevant only in the posh suburbs and fancy parts of our big cities. Kensington and Wimbledon, not Newark and Wolverhampton. That’s not the people I came into politics to represent, the people I grew up around or the people that I know in north Nottinghamshire. It’s not a national party at all.’

His claims accord with documents which are circulating among Tory MPs about a strategy briefing given by Stephen Gilbert, the new head of campaigns. This sums up Labour’s likely 2029 election campaign as ‘stick with the plan’ and Reform’s as ‘change’, leaving the Tories with the negative argument ‘Stop x, y, z’.

‘My worry was that the Tory party is only going to exist in a meaningful sense in pockets of affluence’

Internal polling shows that ‘traditional Conservative’ voters number just 2.6 million. ‘Core Conservative’ voters, who are driven by a desire for competence, are another 2.2 million – a total of fewer than five million votes, down from the 6.8 million Rishi Sunak won in 2024. They identify another 1.9 million ‘Conservative/Reform deciders’, but these are very resistant to the anti-Reform messaging being planned and ‘need to believe the Conservatives can win’, which at the moment looks vanishingly unlikely.

This, Jenrick argues, is not even a ‘blue wall’ strategy to reclaim seats in the south lost to the Liberal Democrats. ‘My worry was that the Tory party is only really going to exist in a meaningful sense in pockets of affluence, predominantly in the south of England, which are not Lib Dem-facing,’ he says. ‘Many people within the Tory party........

© The Spectator