WeeklyWorker

22.01.2026

March to the right

Robert Jenrick’s defection, Reform UK’s consistent lead in opinion polls and talk of Nigel Farage being the next prime minister - all pose urgent challenges for the left. Going ever broader, tailing celebrities, joining a Stop Reform coalition will not do, writes Eddie Ford

Recent developments with the Tory Party and Reform UK clearly indicate that something big is happening in British politics.

This was fairly dramatically highlighted by the defection on January 15 of former Conservative shadow minister Robert Jenrick, albeit a move he was bounced into when Kemi Badenoch posted a video saying she had “clear, irrefutable evidence” that he was plotting secretly to join Nigel Farage’s party “in a way designed to be as damaging as possible” to the Tories, and hence had to be dismissed. She later told the BBC that “it is not a blow to lose someone who lies to his colleagues” and even said that “this has been a good day” because “bad people are leaving my party”, so the Reform leader had been doing her “spring cleaning”. Others have labelled Jenrick a “spy”, due to the suspicion that he will pass on details of Tory strategy to his new colleagues.1

Apparently, he had started having conversations with Reform in September and these were being fed back to Badenoch by a “mole” in his team - it being reported subsequently that Jenrick had left “lying around” a printed copy of his full resignation speech and a media plan for defection “like something from The thick of it”. The plan referred to him as “the new sheriff in town” and “the biggest defection story” Reform has ever had - which is true enough.

Jenrick, having no intention of resigning his seat and forcing a by-election in his Newark constituency, then appeared at a slightly chaotic press conference with a grinning Nigel Farge by his side, at which he delivered a tirade against his old party and former colleagues - declaring that the Conservatives had “broken” the country, “betrayed its voters” and were “rotten”. Of course, he himself had served as housing secretary and immigration minister under “rotten” Conservative governments led by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak.

Defections

Of course, he called on more Tories to follow him into Reform. But only days before, on seeing the defection of former Tory chancellor Nadhim Zahawi, Jenrick, attempting irony, had thanked Badenoch for expelling her former Tory leadership rival and helping “realign the centre-right of British politics”. Later, writing in The Daily Telegraph, Jenrick called on readers to “join the movement” as “the future of the country is on the line”, going on to tell the BBC that he wants to “unite the right”.

Then, a few days later, Andrew Rosindell, Conservative MP for Romford since 2001 and shadow foreign office minister, announced on X that he was also defecting to Reform. He cited the Chagos deal as the main reason for his move - though it had been mooted under the Tories.

Farage, naturally, greeted Rosindell as a “great patriot” and denounced Tory “lies and hypocrisy over the Chagos Islands betrayal”. This happened to coincide, of course, with Donald Trump suddenly calling the UK government’s Chagos plan an act of “great stupidity” - though he initially supported it - and another national security reason why Greenland must be ‘acquired’ by the US.

So Rosindell became the third sitting Tory MP, after Jenrick and Danny Kruger, to switch to Farage's party. Reform UK now has seven MPs, and has been leading in the opinion polls consistently for many months. A recent Ipsos survey has it on 33%, with Labour on 18% and the Tories on 16%.2 There is no rational reason to expect the defections will not continue.

Indeed, at the Jenrick press conference, Nigel Farage stated that a “well-known Labour figure” will defect to the party shortly - with the name of Kate Hoey strongly rumoured. A former Labour MP, she is a fox-hunting enthusiast, a Brexit campaigner and has sat as a non-affiliated peer since 2020 - merely telling Sky News she had not been a Labour member for more than eight years and is “not sure I’m that well-known”. Whether Hoey or some other “well-known Labour figure” ends up jumping to Reform, it would not be in the slightest bit surprising, as politics is moving ever more to the right.

Unpredictability

It is not easy to find suitable analogies with the current situation. The formation of the Social Democratic Party, a rightwing split from Labour in 1990 which included David Owen, Shirely Williams and Roy Jenkins, was quite a significant event in its day, seeming to promise a major realignment. But it does not really cut it as a historical comparison, because that concerned the so-called centre in politics. In fact the SDP was a flash in the pan and soon disappeared in a merger with the Liberal Party. Nonetheless, though Owen, Williams and Jenkins failed in their stated objective of “breaking the mould” of British politics, they did help shift the Labour Party to the right and prepare the ground for Tony Blair and his counter-reformation.

Clearly that could easily be the case with Reform. We have speculated about a possible Tory-Reform pact or even the formation a Tory-Reform Party. However, what is obviously going on with Reform is part of a much larger phenomenon: Le Pen, Meloni, Modi, Putin, etc, etc. Above all, though, there is Donald Trump and his attempt to reboot US global hegemony (Trumpism has nothing to do with US isolationism and allowing other great powers to have their own, legitimate, spheres of influence). Mark Carney is probably right when he said at Davos that we are seeing a “rupture” with the rules-based system, and the old world order is “not coming back”.3

While Tory Party obituaries are doubtless premature, the standard pattern in British politics is that the main opposition party should be riding high in the opinion polls and winning parliamentary and local council by‑elections. But that is not happening - both of the historically established parties are incredibly unpopular today.

Nonetheless, polls can be deceptive and will probably go this way and that over the next three or four years. Then there is the first-past-the-post system. After all, the massive Labour majority under Keir Starmer was achieved with a smaller share of the vote than Jeremy Corbyn gained in 2019. Certainly what Morgan McSweeney is banking on is stampeding voters, left, right and centre, into the Labour fold precisely because of the Reform threat.

The SWP’s latest Together celebrity popular front wonderfully plays into that narrative (Reform supposedly equalling some kind of “new form of fascism”4). Indeed, it is not inconceivable that Your Party MPs - if any survive the next general election - could be tempted into a Labour-led Stop Reform coalition government (perhaps along with the Zak Polanski’s Greens and the Scots and Welsh nats).

Ruined

Anyway, there is no denying that Jenrick’s defection is a real feather in Farage’s cap. Nonetheless, the more defections they get from the Tory Party, not only of councillors, but especially of shadow ministers and leading former ministers, the more Reform comes to look like the Tory Party - and the more Reform will then be associated with 14 years of Tory (mis)rule.

We have had a comical situation where Kemi Badenoch and other Tories cannot entirely make up their minds as to whether Britain is ‘ruined’ or not, because that poses the awkward question: if it is, who caused that? At the moment, the Tory leader is arguing - not entirely convincingly - that Britain is not “broken”: rather it faces “challenges” and its “best days are ahead” (unlike her “miserabilist” opponents on the right).5

However, the increasingly overriding rightwing narrative has it that the country is broken or ruined, or at least highly damaged. The trouble with this is, you cannot then ignore the years of Tory government and the role of Tory defectors now in Reform, like Nadine Dorris and Nadhim Zahawi, or Robert Jenrick for that matter. They applauded Boris Johnson, and thus have their share of responsibility for the ‘Boris wave’ that saw a significant or ‘uncontrolled’ increase in immigration, following the implementation of new post-Brexit visa rules. In turn, the more possible it is that Reform becomes a Conservative Party mark two.

Nigel Farage is aware of this, of course, writing in the Telegraph that Reform was “not a rescue charity for every panicky Tory MP” and that any potential defectors would have to be prepared to admit publicly that the previous Conservative government “broke the country”.6 Reform exists, he says, to become a new force in British politics, not a home for failed Tories.

Therefore, Farage declares in his article, his party will not accept any more defectors after the May 7 local elections, in order to dispel the illusions of any Conservative MP who “still clings to the hope that their party can recover and waits until May 8 to try to leave the sinking ship”. If so, “they do not understand how rapidly things are changing out in the country”, he writes, as Reform has “no interest in rescuing political failures”: Farage is only interested in defectors who “truly believe in Reform's fundamental values of family, community and country”.

Communists can imagine Nigel Farage as prime minister or a Reform government emerging after the next general election, even if we get immediately hit by all the obstacles to such a scenario. As we have pointed out before, opinion polls are not a prediction of the future - they are a snapshot of where we are now, and things can change very rapidly. Margaret Thatcher was facing a landslide defeat before the Falklands War, but afterwards she was hailed as virtually the new Winston Churchill and won the 1983 election with a majority of 144 seats, marking one of the most decisive election victories in post-war Britain. Then there are Donald Trump’s disastrously low poll ratings, which are the second worst in US polling history, when it comes to a sitting US president - the worst, of course, being the first Trump presidency.

We are not saying for a minute that this is what a general election will look like. Regardless though, it is still worth thinking about the possibilities that might be confronting us in the not-too-distant future.

  1. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjw1709n20qo.↩︎

  2. markpack.org.uk/155623/voting-intention-opinion-poll-scorecard.↩︎

  3. theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/21/mark-carney-davos-old-world-order-trump-switzerland-greenland.↩︎

  4. See Alex Callincos ‘Is the United States turning to fascism’ Socialist Worker January 14 2026.↩︎

  5. independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/kemi-badenoch-britain-broken-robert-jenrick-b2902443.html.↩︎

  6. telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/01/17/reform-is-not-a-rescue-charity-for-every-panicky-tory-mp.↩︎