by Chris Harris
The day after Nadhim Zahawi left the Conservative Party for Reform UK, I was sitting with my mother. Like me, she’s into her politics. I said to her, quite simply, that Robert Jenrick would not be far behind.
I didn’t say it because I have some special instinct. I said it because it looked obvious. Zahawi was the first properly high-profile defection, high-profile, if not exactly shining with credibility and surely as a journalist you think who is next, assess, and conclude the bleedin’ obvious.
What really clinched it for me was that Jenrick, normally never knowingly under-audible, had gone quiet. When a habitual loud voice suddenly stops making noise, it often means they’re not reflecting; it means they’re moving. Sure enough, the next day, he did it: Jenrick left for Reform, after being sacked from Badenoch’s shadow cabinet and having his party membership suspended.
What surprised me wasn’t the defection. It was the fact that it apparently took most of the political pundit class by surprise.
I’m not a political journalist. I’m not a pundit. I’m not on a panel twice a week performing instant blah blah blah into a microphone. I’m just someone who pays attention and tries to think one or two moves ahead. So when the people whose job it is to watch politics for a living seem blindsided by the thing that was fairly clearly coming, you do start to wonder what’s happened to political journalism in this country.
My own explanation is dull, but persuasive: the “now, now, now” culture.
Everything has to be responded to immediately. Not just written up, but reacted to, clipped, packaged, and fed into the daily churn, podcasts, clips, live blogs, social media, and the endless demand for hot takes that sound decisive even when they’re built on nothing solid. The coverage becomes so obsessed with the present tense that it forgets what used to make political journalism interesting: reflection, judgement, and prediction.
Which brings me to Kemi Badenoch, and the way much of the commentary has framed her role in this.
A number of journalists have rushed to praise her as if she has shown great strength by “sacking” Jenrick. But the honest reading looks different. Badenoch has had a long time to deal with a figure who has repeatedly tested her authority and positioned himself, openly, as a potential rival. When action comes only at the moment someone is already halfway out the door, it doesn’t read as strength; it reads as necessity. Badenoch’s move looks less like a bold intervention and more like an attempt to limit damage once it became unavoidable.
And then we get the familiar round of immediate punditry. Is it good for the Conservatives? Is it good for Reform? Is this the beginning of a flood? Is it a masterstroke? Is it a disaster?
The truth is much simpler, and it’s the only question that matters.
Will anyone follow him?
If Jenrick goes and nobody significant follows, he doesn’t look like the start of a movement. He looks like a man who made a high-stakes gamble and misjudged the appetite for it. If, on the other hand, respected Conservative MPs begin to shift in the next couple of weeks, proper figures, not just the usual restless types, then his move gets reframed. It becomes a genuine political shift.
That’s why most of the instant commentary is so hollow. Everyone is arguing over outcomes based on the present, the actual sacking and defection, while missing the fact that the outcome depends on a variable we simply haven’t seen yet. You can’t honestly call it, because it’s not about vibes or headlines. It’s about decisions made quietly, behind the scenes, by MPs calculating their futures.
I also think Jenrick’s motivation is fairly straightforward. Inside the Conservative Party, his route to the top looks difficult. In Reform, it looks easier, especially if he believes Nigel Farage is ultimately changeable, distractible, or simply not permanent. If Reform continues rising, there’s a logic to thinking it could become the more plausible platform for ambition.
But that strategy has a built-in danger: if you jump too early, and no one comes with you, you don’t look like a visionary. You look isolated.
So my view is this. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll learn what this really was.
If nobody follows Jenrick, he’s damaged himself and may have misread both Reform and the Conservative parliamentary party. If credible MPs do follow, then he’s helped accelerate a split on the right and positioned himself for real influence.
What I find dispiriting is that so much of today’s political journalism struggles to make room for that kind of thinking. Too much of it lives inside the next news cycle, the next press conference, the next clip, the next five minutes. It’s always “what’s happening right now”, rarely “what does this mean if we give it two weeks”.
And that’s why an ordinary observer can sometimes look clever: not because they are, but because they’re still willing to do the unfashionable thing—pause, think, and predict.
It goes without saying, many journalists get all this, but it is surprising just how many so called respected journalists from respected news organisations have reduced themselves to the here and now and low grade journalism, Sure, my writing is citizen journalism, and unless it is about Lewes FC, and not Westminster, is not widely read, but at least I get the basics of what you should be doing.
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