Political parties do not die in public. They rot in private. Then they start moving again…
This is where British politics now stands. Not at the birth of something new, but in the uncanny afterlife of something that should already be buried. The Tory Party is no longer a functioning organism. It is a political corpse, kept upright by habit and fear, animated by reflex rather than conviction. And Reform UK has assumed the role of resurrectionist, cutting into the body and extracting whatever still twitches, gambling that stitched-together parts might pass for renewal.
The latest extraction is Robert Jenrick.
His defection was stage-managed with theatrical precision by Nigel Farage on Thursday afternoon, the culmination of a plot so elaborate it required concealed documents, whispered meetings, and the kind of backstage choreography that defines modern politics at its most cynical. This was not an ideological awakening. It was an exposure. The curtain fell, and there stood a man without a party, holding a speech he had already written, waiting for his cue.
Jenrick’s move to Reform UK is not the birth of a movement. It is grave robbery dressed as rebirth. This is not a clean break from failure. It is the recycling of it. The Tories have become a zombie. Reform is harvesting its remains, organ by organ, betting that motion can be mistaken for life.
Hours earlier, Jenrick had been the Conservative shadow justice secretary. He was sacked by Kemi Badenoch for secretly planning his escape. By the same afternoon, he re-emerged under Reform’s colours, declaring with solemn gravity that Britain is “in decline” and both major parties “rotten”.
One costume change. One press conference. A man who helped govern Britain for over a decade now presents himself as the cure for the damage he helped cause.
The collapse of credibility is absolute. But in Westminster, absurdity has ceased to be disqualifying. It has become the script.
And Jenrick is not wrong about one thing. Both major parties are rotten. The Tories are a hollowed-out shell, sustained by memory rather than purpose. Labour, for all its 2024 landslide, governs like a party with one foot already in the grave, paralysed by timidity, emptied of ideology, and terrified of doing anything that might look like conviction. Keir Starmer is not building a new Britain. His government is managing the decline of the old one, implementing austerity with one hand while gesturing vaguely at progressive values with the other.
This is what makes Reform’s rise so revealing. It is not that Farage offers genuine change. It is that voters have become so desperate for any sign of life in Westminster that they are willing to try the most extreme option available, just to see if the pulse they detect is real or another trick of the light.
Reform UK has become the test case. The question is not whether Nigel Farage can win power. The question is whether the neoliberal zombie curse that has consumed both Labour and the Conservatives will infest Reform too, or whether something genuinely different can survive in the toxic soil of British politics.
The evidence so far is not encouraging.
The Architect of Failure
Jenrick is the man who, as Immigration Minister, presided over 56,000 asylum seekers housed in hotels at taxpayer expense. The same man who claimed credit for instituting “the biggest reduction in net migration of all time”, a boast based on projections, not results. The housing secretary who approved a planning application for a media tycoon after a fundraising dinner, sparing him a £45 million charge, a decision later ruled unlawful.
When Jenrick resigned from Rishi Sunak’s government in December 2023, he positioned himself as a principled hardliner, arguing the Rwanda asylum plan did not go far enough. Yet under his watch as minister, the very migration system he now decries was operating at full capacity. He spent 14 months in the Home Office. Net migration in that period exceeded 700,000 per year.
This is not someone rejecting the Tory establishment. This is the Tory establishment digging themselves out of the grave when the mausoleum door is sealed.
The Fraud and His New Friend
Five months ago, Nigel Farage called Robert Jenrick “a fraud” and insisted he was “not to be trusted”. In a video posted on X, Farage attacked Jenrick for turning up at protests outside an asylum hotel in Epping, accusing him of pretending to side with local people when he had been the architect of the very policies they were protesting against.
Now, Farage welcomes him as a “late Christmas present”, thanking Kemi Badenoch for “jumping the gun” and sacking Jenrick before the defection could be staged on Jenrick’s terms. The Reform leader even admitted there was only a “60/40” chance Jenrick would join before Badenoch forced his hand.
This is not conviction politics. This is career management. Both men understand the transaction perfectly. Farage gets a former shadow justice secretary with frontbench experience and a 70 per cent approval rating on ConservativeHome. Jenrick gets a political future that looked terminal 24 hours earlier when he was bookmakers’ favourite to challenge Badenoch for the Tory leadership.
What neither can explain is how this represents genuine change. Jenrick served in five Tory governments. He was housing secretary under Boris Johnson, exchequer secretary under Theresa May, health minister under Liz Truss, immigration minister under Rishi Sunak. At every stage, he implemented, defended, and benefited from the policies he now claims broke Britain.
The Pattern of Necromancy
Three days before Jenrick’s theatrical unveiling, Reform UK welcomed an even more significant transplant: Nadhim Zahawi, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer.
This was not just any defection. This was the arrival of a man who once held Britain’s second-highest office of state. A man who led the Conservative Party as its chairman. A man who was sacked by Rishi Sunak in 2023 after an investigation found he had seriously breached ministerial rules by failing to disclose that HMRC was investigating him for underpayment of millions in tax. Zahawi later confirmed he paid nearly £5 million to settle the matter.
According to Conservative sources, Zahawi had repeatedly sought a peerage in the weeks before his defection. Each request was denied. Within days, he was sitting beside Nigel Farage, declaring that “Britain needs Nigel Farage as prime minister” and calling for a new “glorious revolution”.
The cynicism is breathtaking even by Westminster standards. In 2015, Zahawi tweeted at Farage: “I would be frightened to live in a country run by you. Your comments are offensive and racist.” When asked about this at his defection press conference, Zahawi laughed it off. “Good on you for digging out a tweet from 11 years ago,” he said, as if a decade could erase the moral clarity of calling someone racist, or as if moral clarity itself was just another position to be abandoned when convenient.
Zahawi joins a procession that grows longer each month. Jenrick is merely the latest, though his status as shadow justice secretary and former leadership contender makes him symbolically important. But the pattern is undeniable. Nadine Dorries defected in September 2025, declaring the Conservative Party “dead”. Danny Kruger followed two weeks later, announcing the Tories were “over” and calling Farage “the political right’s last hope”. Lee Anderson defected in March 2024, giving Reform its first MP.
Then came the flood. Adam Holloway. Maria Caulfield. Jake Berry. Anne Marie Morris. Three more in December alone: Jonathan Gullis, Lia Nici, Chris Green. By January 2026, Reform had established a dedicated team to process defection applications and set up an online form. There is now a queue.
These are not refugees fleeing a sinking ship. They are passengers trying to rearrange the deck chairs while moving to a different part of the vessel. Most lost their seats in 2024. Those still in Parliament, like Kruger and now Jenrick, are protecting their careers, not reforming anything. And those like Zahawi, denied the ermine they sought, have simply found another route to relevance.
The Conservative Party described Zahawi as just another “has-been politician looking for their next gravy train”. They are not wrong. But that description applies equally to every figure on Reform’s growing roster of ex-Tories. What makes this dangerous is not the individual cynicism. It is the systemic pattern. The same people who broke Britain are now positioning themselves as the solution, having merely changed the colour of their rosettes.
Why It Matters
The danger is not that Reform will succeed. The danger is that this endless churn of personnel between parties makes democratic accountability impossible. Jenrick campaigned as a Conservative in 2024. He was elected as a Conservative. He served in a Conservative shadow cabinet. Now he sits as a Reform MP, with no requirement to face the voters who chose him.
The same voters who rejected Tory policies at the ballot box in July 2024 are now being governed by those same politicians wearing different rosettes. The policies have not changed. The instincts have not changed. Only the branding has changed.
This is what happens when parties stop being vehicles for ideas and become franchises for career politicians. The public votes for change, and the same faces simply rebrand themselves, confident that the electorate will not be consulted again for years.
Meanwhile, the substance of politics remains untouched. Immigration policy will not change because Jenrick has swapped parties. Housing will not be fixed by recycling the man who failed to fix it as housing secretary. The welfare system will not be reformed by people who spent 14 years breaking it.
What we are witnessing is not a realignment of British politics. It is a shell game, played by professionals who understand that survival in Westminster depends not on principle but on timing. The Conservative Party is being carved up and sold for parts. The buyers are the same surgeons who killed the patient. And Labour, watching from across the dispatch box, offers no alternative beyond competent management of the same failing system.
Britain does not need better zombies. It needs politics that is actually alive.
The corpse of conservatism is being harvested for organs. And the transplant surgeons are the same people who declared the patient dead.
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