Badenoch turned a crisis into an opportunity - but her Reform problems aren't over
Kemi Badenoch's bombshell video sacking of Robert Jenrick shocked all of us. But, in seizing the moment and surprising her enemies, she managed to avert a clear crisis.
Friday 16 January 2026 10:30, UK
Times really have changed. What the hell has just happened?
Robert Jenrick has defected to Reform after Kemi Badenoch found some evidence and unceremoniously sacked him.
It was a bombshell, every which way. That one of the biggest names in the Conservative Party and a leading shadow cabinet minister was preparing to defect was a mega moment with huge reverberations. That Badenoch pushed him before he jumped was too.
By flushing out her rival and effectively expelling him from the party on her terms, Badenoch managed, in the moment to turn this crisis into a opportunity, catch Nigel Farage and Jenrick off guard, assert her authority and frame Jenrick as treacherous and opportunist.
"She's blown him apart," one Jenrick-backing MP told me. "It's been seen as a sign of strength. She got ahead of it, and is getting credit for being decisive."
But beneath this short-term bounce is potentially a much deeper cratering - because the departure of Jenrick from the Conservatives will be looked back on as a defining day.
Beyond the spectacle of what looked like an episode of The Traitors playing out in Westminster in a highly dramatic day, this moment will be looked back on as a defining one in the battle for the British right.
Badenoch and many of her colleagues might be relieved that Jenrick, who had been constantly shadow boxing the leader since losing out to her just over a year ago, has left the party.
"I don't want to lose people, but if people are actively damaging the party, they cannot stay," Badenoch told me in an interview yesterday.
"Rob is clearly a problem, but he's not my problem, he's Nigel Farage's problem now."
But he is likely to be a much bigger problem for them on the outside rather than in the tent.
Because this wasn't just a psychodrama between a leader and her rival - the tale of Badenoch and Jenrick was a much bigger story about the battle for the right in British politics between the oldest political party in the world, the Conservatives, and the disruptive newcomer Reform.
Jenrick laid down that gauntlet in the hastily scrambled defection announcement when he declared to the country that the Conservative Party "broke Britain" and was a "rotten party" that was "no longer fit for purpose".
Read more:
All the former Conservative MPs who have defected to Reform
Ex-Tory chancellor defects to Reform
Badenoch might have blunted that message by surprising her enemy in this battle, but Jenrick's departure is an inflection point in the much bigger war on the British right.
Because in the steady drip of defections from the Conservatives to Reform, Jenrick isn't just a splash - he's a cannonball, and the ripples of this watershed day will travel deep and wide.
How this war plays out will set the ground for the 2029 general election.
There are those on the right who think the only way they get back into government is through a pact between the Conservatives and Reform.
But that sort of accommodation between the two sides now seems almost impossible to see with this amount of bloodletting: This appears to be a fight to the death and Farage is building his army.