The Zombie Transplant Accelerates: What Rosindell’s Move to Reform Reveals About Our Political Endgame
British politics has entered its gothic phase. The lights are still on at Westminster, the corridors still echo with speeches, but the pulse grows fainter by the day. What we are witnessing is not renewal. It is reanimation.
Over the last week, the zombie Tory Party has begun shedding limbs and grafting them onto Reform UK, calling the procedure a revolution. One by one, senior Conservatives cross the floor, not as penitents seeking redemption, but as veterans of the very order they now claim to oppose.
Frankenstein’s Workshop on an Industrial Scale
Labour Heartlands documented this pattern in “The Zombie Transplant” and “The Vicar of Bray Goes to Reform.” What unfolds before us is not only the death of the Tory Party but its reassembly under new management, a Frankenstein experiment, hoping for a lightning bolt.
Reform now boasts seven sitting MPs. Six are former Conservatives. The party has absorbed approximately twenty-one former Tory parliamentarians in total: former chancellors, cabinet ministers, shadow cabinet members, career backbenchers. Old parts, new body, same animating force.
Nigel Farage presents himself as the insurgent, the outsider, the voice of the forgotten. Yet his party rapidly transforms into a retirement home for the very political class that created the forgotten in the first place.
Danny Kruger, who defected in September, now serves as Reform’s “head of preparing for government.” Kruger spent years defending Conservative austerity. Now he prepares to govern under a different flag with the same ideology.
Robert Jenrick, in his defection speech, attacked his former colleagues Mel Stride and Priti Patel for their records in government. He offered no explanation for why his own record might be cleaner. As immigration minister, he failed to reduce immigration. As housing minister, he failed to build houses. As health minister, he failed to clear the NHS backlog. His defection does not erase these failures. It simply moves them to a different column in the ledger.
The Flag and the Reality
I recall my old local years ago, a working men’s club in Doncaster. Someone had repainted the sign above the door: “Under New Management”.
Inside, the carpet remained sticky. The beer stayed sour. The same men sat in the corner, nursing the same grievances. Only the price of the pint had changed.
Andrew Rosindell’s defection is exactly this. Same shit, different sign.
For decades, Rosindell served as a loyal foot soldier for the Tory Party. He marched through the lobbies to vote for austerity. He supported the gutting of public services. He watched, ostensibly mute, while his party presided over the “managed decline” he now decries in his resignation letter.
Now, as the Tory carcass begins to stink of final decay, he leaps toward what he perceives as the lifeboat.
Patriotism as Camouflage
Rosindell’s resignation letter invokes Margaret Thatcher. It speaks of sovereignty and self-determination. It deploys the symbols of national pride to justify a political calculation.
This matters because patriotism in Britain’s heartlands is not theatre. It is the lived experience of communities that sent their sons and daughters to war, that built the industries which powered an empire, that believed the promises made about reward for loyalty.
When that patriotism is weaponised by career politicians seeking safe harbour from electoral collapse, it becomes something else entirely. It becomes camouflage.
Rosindell weeps for the Chagos Islands. He weeps for British sovereignty surrendered over a scattering of coral and military infrastructure that most of his constituents could not find on a map.
But where were his tears when British sovereignty over essential utilities was surrendered to foreign equity firms? Where was his defence of British interests when Port Talbot’s blast furnaces went cold, when the railways were carved up and sold to Deutsche Bahn and SNCF, when the Royal Mail was flogged for a fraction of its value to hedge funds who cashed out within hours?
The Conservatives governed over the greatest fire sale in British history. North Sea oil and gas sold to foreign corporations. Water monopolies handed to Australian pension funds and Chinese state enterprises. Energy networks parcelled out to Hong Kong billionaires and French state utilities. British Steel, British Leyland, British Aerospace, the prefix stripped away along with the ownership.
And Rosindell? He was there. Voting in the lobbies. Defending the government line. Explaining to his constituents that privatisation was progress and decline was necessary.
He watched British sovereignty auctioned off piece by piece to the highest foreign bidder. He said nothing when Thames Water was sold. Nothing when our energy security was surrendered. Nothing when the steel that built an empire was allowed to rust while we imported Chinese alternatives.
But an unknown island in an unknown sea? That is his final straw. That is where British sovereignty becomes sacred.
This is not principle. This is performance. Sovereignty matters when it can be wielded as political theatre. It evaporates when it conflicts with the interests of capital, when it stands between a Tory minister and a lucrative privatisation, when defending it might cost votes or patronage.
The answer is simple: Rosindell’s patriotism has always been selective. It extends to flags and overseas territories and the symbols of British power. It does not extend to the industries that employed British workers, the utilities that serve British communities, or the assets that might have funded British public services.
He will drape himself in the Union Jack while voting to sell what lies beneath it. That is not sovereignty. That is a closing down sale with better branding.
The Laundry Cycle
Keir Starmer, in a rare moment of clarity at Prime Minister’s Questions, called Reform “a laundry service for disgraced Tory politicians.” The phrase landed because it contains truth.
Consider the operation: Nadhim Zahawi, sacked for failing to declare millions in unpaid tax. Robert Jenrick, who oversaw record NHS waiting lists and presided over the housing crisis as minister. Andrew Rosindell, who voted 428 times with a government that left Britain’s public services on their knees.
Each arrives at Reform headquarters, delivers a short speech about “broken Britain,” and emerges cleansed. The stains of their record are laundered away by the simple act of changing rosette colour from blue to turquoise.
Nigel Farage himself acknowledged the risk in a Telegraph article, insisting Reform is “not a rescue charity for every panicky Tory MP.” He set a condition: defectors must publicly admit the Conservative government “broke the country.”
They duly comply. Jenrick declared both main parties “broke Britain.” Zahawi called the Conservatives a “defunct brand.” Rosindell lamented “a generation of managed decline.”
Not one mentioned their own role in that decline. Not one acknowledged their votes, their policies, their ministerial decisions. They speak of the Conservative government in the third person, as if observing from a distance rather than sitting in the Cabinet Room.
This is not confession. This is ventriloquism.
The Cryogenic Chamber for Thatcherism
By absorbing these defectors, Reform UK does not challenge the Tory legacy. It preserves it. Reform becomes the cryogenic chamber for Thatcherism, keeping the ideology alive while the original host body withers away.
Here lies the danger for Labour Heartlands readers, and it exceeds the fate of individual politicians or parties.
Britain no longer offers a duopoly. It offers a triumvirate of conformity.
On one side, Keir Starmer’s Labour promises managerial competence, fiscal responsibility, and continuity. They have accepted the economic settlement of the last forty years. They will not challenge ownership structures, will not confront the power of capital, will not break with the consensus that presided over decline.
On another side, Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives stumble forward, a corpse animated by muscle memory, still walking but no longer thinking.
And now, on the third side, Reform. They shout louder. They wave bigger flags. But their economic prescription remains identical: deregulation, reduced public spending, worship of the market, contempt for collective power.
Farage rails against “the Blob” while recruiting its architects. He attacks the establishment while absorbing establishment figures wholesale. He promises radical change while his defectors pledge allegiance to the same Thatcherite settlement that created the conditions they now claim to oppose.
This is not choice. This is rotation.
The Last Gamble
And yet, here is the grim arithmetic of our present moment: Reform UK increasingly looks set to form the next government. Not through enthusiasm. Not through vision. But through the same mechanism that delivered Keir Starmer to Number 10: a complete absence of alternatives.
The people see Reform as the last gamble on the most fundamental question a democracy can ask itself: do we still have a party that can not only offer change but make change happen? Is there anyone left who might actually mean what they say?
Something tells me we will all be very disappointed. When Farage walks through the door of Downing Street surrounded by recycled Thatcherites and rebranded austerity merchants, the promised revolution will reveal itself as what it always was: a management reshuffle with better marketing.
But here is the perverse possibility that haunts me: if Reform does form the next government, you can bet your last pound that the other parties will go through such a reset and transition that British politics will never be the same again. Labour and the Conservatives, stripped of office and excuses, might finally be forced to become something other than pale variations of the same theme. The shock of a Farage government might be the cattle prod that British democracy needs to finally wake from its thirty-year coma.
Of course, the alternative is grimmer still: no change at all. Reform wins, governs exactly as the Conservatives did, and the cycle continues unbroken. The faces change, the policies remain, and the managed decline we have endured since Thatcher becomes permanent architecture rather than temporary crisis.
This is the choice we face: catastrophic change that might, through its very catastrophe, break the stasis, or continued stagnation dressed in new clothes. Neither offers hope. Both offer certainty that the people asking the questions will not like the answers.
The Material Reality
Rosindell’s letter laments that the “views and concerns of the majority of the British people must no longer be sidelined.”
He is correct in his diagnosis but dishonest in his cure.
The people are sidelined. They are sidelined because all three main parties answer to the same masters: the City, the bond markets, the media moguls who decide whether a defection constitutes “betrayal” or “patriotic act.”
Step back from the theatre of defections and ask a simpler question: what changes for the single mother in Romford struggling to afford childcare?
Rosindell’s defection does not build her a council house. It does not increase her wages. It does not restore the Sure Start centre that closed in 2015.
Jenrick’s speech about broken Britain does not reduce her energy bills or shorten her wait for a GP appointment.
Zahawi’s conversion to Reform does not claw back the wealth transferred from workers to shareholders over the last four decades.
The great reassembly of Britain’s right offers working people nothing they do not already have: a choice between three variations of managed decline, each promising restoration while delivering stagnation.
The Counter-Argument
Some will argue that Rosindell, Jenrick, and Zahawi are men of genuine conviction. They will say these defections represent a sincere break with a failed party and a fresh commitment to national renewal.
We do not deny that individuals can change their minds or that principle sometimes requires painful choices.
But principle requires consistency, not convenience. And the timing reveals the truth.
Not one of these men defected when the Conservative government was strong. Not one resigned when the policies they now condemn were being implemented. Not one broke ranks when it would have cost them their position.
They waited. They calculated. They watched the polls. And when the Tory ship began to list, they quietly stepped into the lifeboats.
If Robert Jenrick believed Britain was broken by Conservative policy, he had years to say so from the government benches. His silence then undermines his conviction now.
If Nadhim Zahawi believed Nigel Farage should be Prime Minister, why did he spend years calling Farage frightening and divisive? His past words do not vanish because they become politically inconvenient.
If Andrew Rosindell’s red line was sovereignty, why did he vote with a government that surrendered it piecemeal to corporate interests for years without protest?
The answers to these questions do not speak of principle. They speak of calculation.
What Comes Next
Farage has set a deadline of May 7th, the date of local elections, for further defections. After that, he says, the door closes. The message to Conservative MPs is clear: jump now while you can be welcomed as converts rather than refugees.
This is strategy, not morality. Farage understands the defections serve dual purposes. First, they provide Reform with parliamentary experience and governmental credibility it otherwise lacks. Second, they accelerate the Conservative collapse, eliminating Reform’s primary competitor on the right before the next general election.
But they also create a profound problem for Reform’s claim to represent something new.
Every defector tethers Reform more tightly to the Conservative record. Every former minister brings the baggage of government failure. Every career politician who crosses the floor reinforces the perception that Reform is not insurgency but inheritance.
The risk for Farage is that Reform becomes Conservative Party 2.0: the same people, the same ideology, the same economic prescriptions, merely repackaged in angrier rhetoric and wrapped in a bigger flag.
For working-class communities, this should serve as a warning.
The Reassembly
Andrew Rosindell’s defection is not the story. The story is the systematic reassembly of Britain’s political elite under new branding while the fundamental consensus remains undisturbed.
Twenty-one former Conservative politicians have now joined Reform. They bring decades of government experience and parliamentary knowledge. They also bring the record of failure that created the conditions they now claim to oppose.
This is not renewal. This is recycling.
For Labour Heartlands, the task is to see through the theatre. A Tory in a Reform rosette remains a Tory. A politician who voted for austerity does not become a champion of the working class by changing party.
The defections clarify the battlefield. Britain faces not a choice between left and right, Labour and Conservative, establishment and insurgent. Britain faces a choice between three versions of the same elite consensus and something genuinely different.
That something different does not yet exist in Parliament. It exists in communities that have been abandoned, in workers who have been exploited, in families who have been failed.
It will not be built by politicians who check the wind before changing direction. It will be built by those who refuse to accept that decline is inevitable, that austerity is necessary, or that the present settlement is the only option.
The defections will continue. The reassembly will accelerate. And the same people who broke Britain will promise to fix it under a different flag.
The greatest trick the elite ever pulled was convincing you their reshuffle was your revolution.
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