At the Tory conference back in October, Robert Jenrick spoke at a fringe meeting about how he had taken up karate and reading Dickens a way of biding his time in Opposition; or perhaps more accurately, biding his time before launching a second leadership bid after losing out to Badenoch in 2024. When pressed, he mentioned A Tale of Two Cities, a novel known for its famous bloody execution scene with Dickens’s hero saying "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done” before his head is garrotted. The guillotine on Jenrick’s Conservative party career (a member since the age of 16) came down yesterday morning around 11 am when the Tory’s chief whip, Rebecca Harris, called Jenrick to say he had been busted plotting to defect to Reform, and that he was sacked as Justice Secretary as well as having his party membership suspended. After denying it, he then slammed the phone down. Minutes later, Badenoch released an online video saying Jenrick had been sacked because of ‘irrefutable evidence’. These notes, or a draft speech – originally claimed to be left ‘lying around his office’ but more likely forwarded to Badenoch from a spy within Jenrick’s team – in which he said some deeply unflattering remarks about the Tories, including that had ‘forfeited’ the right to govern. This, indeed, became the theme of Jenrick’s speech at Reform HQ when he was revealed at around 4.45pm – not without some dark comedy when he failed to emerge on cue at the packed press conference I attended in Millbank Tower - as Farage’s latest Tory MP defector and new party member. Jenrick wasted little time in using excoriating language to blast the Labour Government for ‘accelerating’ Britain’s decline. But then he was soon pointing his second barrel firmly in the direction of his former party and colleagues saying the country was ‘broken’ and ‘we've had 20 to 30 years of it.’ Why, asked Jenrick, getting into his stride after the first minute of his speech, ‘because the two main parties are rotten. They're no longer fit for purpose. They both broke Britain. And neither can fix it.
 It's a conclusion about the Conservative Party that it has pained me to reach’. Right there, around 4.50pm, wearing his Brutus-like haircut, standing up in his lean karate trained body, he wielded the knife. A flicker of a smile crossed Nigel’s face, seated to his left in a dark suit and mauve shirt. Yes, he had ‘respect’ for Kemi, and even ‘cherished’ his former party's contribution to Britain reeling off names like Pitt, Peel, Churchill and Thatcher – his daughter’s middle name. But then the heads of former colleagues began to roll…The likes of Mel Stride and Priti Patel were ‘not radical enough’ and represented the death throes of a ‘failed party’. ‘But our country is in a precarious, dangerous position’ he continued. ‘And our first loyalty must be to our country. Turning it around will require us all to speak the truth. And act accordingly’. The lethal political karate chops went on, only he wasn’t just using his hands – the knife stabs kept coming fast and deadly. Only that morning, Jenrick had woken up to find himself leading a poll as the Tory members’ clear favourite to be the next party leader. Now he was saying nobody in the party had the ‘competence or backbone needed to fix it.’ Both parties, he went on, were ‘committed to a set of ideas that have failed and are failing Britain with Boris Johnson’s Tory party being accused of leaving the country ‘almost without a border.’ And so the Wolverhampton karate kid’s savaging act went on. As the dust settled this morning on yesterday’s political theatre – which included Nigel Farage being ‘surprised’ to learn of Jenrick’s sacking whilst campaigning up in Scotland – both sides claimed they were the winners of the Battle for the Right. Badenoch was praised by Lord Gove for the ruthless and swift manner in which she killed off 44 year old Jenrick’s political ambitions as a Tory leader. At least Kemi doesn’t have to worry now about a nakedly ambitious pretender to the throne destabilising her authority and plotting to usurp her after her party’s most likely dismal results in the 7th May local elections. Indeed, Farage repeatedly made the point at the hastily organised press conference – likely to be seen by historians as an inflexion point in the shifting paradigm of the right wing political landscape – that after the local elections, the Tories would cease to become a ‘national party’. We shall have to wait and see what happens but at least, for now, Kemi looks safe and the radio waves were full of loyal Tory MPs talking about how the Conservative party had ‘never been more united’. Badenoch seemed upbeat yesterday that the chief thorn in her side had now been removed. “It was always about him, it wasn’t about us” she quipped, adding – with her own test of the knife - that Rob is now “Nigel Farage’s problem”. On Farage’s side, he quipped in his stage introduction to revealing J...