The Great Migration: How Reform Became a Shelter for Political Survivors On Their Quest For Fire and Relevance
One of the problems with British politics — and something Reform may soon discover — is that if you ask anyone outside the Westminster bubble who Robert Jenrick or Andrew Rosindell are, the most likely response is not outrage, recognition, or political passion. It’s “who?”
And even if you persist — “Jenrick, Robert Jenrick, Newark MP…” — before reciting a small anthology of scandals, culture-war performances, ethical ambiguities, policy failures and outright corruption, they still won’t suddenly remember him.
It isn’t necessarily because they’re disengaged — although it may help Reform if people are — but because Westminster’s minor villains (Jenrick, in particular) rarely travel well beyond Westminster.
For my part, I’ve been tracking Jenrick’s path for quite some time. As such it’s worth recognising that Jenrick didn’t just wake up one morning and discover Reform. He has been walking in that direction for years. Slowly, publicly, and often very loudly.
In January last year, I wrote that Jenrick was attempting to turn culture-war provocation into political capital — borrowing from the Suella Braverman playbook by positioning himself as a future martyr of the right, hoping outrage would be mistaken for leadership. I described him as echoing Reform’s ideological fringe while quietly preparing for a moment when the Conservative Party and Reform would begin to converge.
By March, the trajectory had become harder to ignore. I argued at the time that Jenrick was already in permanent leadership campaign mode — not driven by any moral rupture with government policy, but by frustration that it wasn’t draconian enough. His resignation as Immigration Minister back when he was a member of Rishi Sunak’s cabinet (in 2023) wasn’t a protest against incompetence or illegality; it was a complaint that cruelty had been insufficiently theatrical.
From there, his positioning shifted into something more deliberate: presenting himself as the standard-bearer for a cruel and callous Conservative right convinced the party hadn’t failed because of its record, but because it hadn’t pandered hard enough to its most extreme instincts.
By October, the strategy had become openly performative.
His visit to Handsworth — where he described the area as a “slum” and complained about not seeing “another white face” — wasn’t a misstep. It was branding. When he refused to apologise, I wrote that this wasn’t weakness but marketing: an audition for Reform voters, donors, and disillusioned MPs.
The aim was no longer subtle.
It was to carve out a niche as the “respectable” face of resentment — the thinking man’s Farage, the moderate’s Enoch Powell, a politician trying to build relevance through division.
Seen in that light, Jenrick’s defection doesn’t represent a sudden ideological conversion. It represents the completion of a repositioning exercise that has been unfolding (and shapeshifting) in public for more than two years.
There is another layer to this repositioning that is harder to ignore.
For those following his rise, Jenrick’s political evolution has taken place almost entirely inside the attention economy of Elon Musk’s platform X. While attacking judges, migrants, “woke institutions” and liberal consensus culture, he has remained conspicuously quiet about the man whose algorithm now decides which grievances get oxygen and which don’t.
That silence is not accidental.