Robert Jenrick is only following the logic of the New Right

Behind all the intrigue, his Tory-Reform switch reflects the belief that cosmopolitan politics is in terminal decline

Most political defections turn out to be historical footnotes. But every so often they prove to be bellwethers. When Sir Charles Trevelyan left the Liberals for Labour just over a century ago, most dismissed it as the erratic behaviour of an eccentric baronet. Yet what they were witnessing was the start of a tectonic shift in the landscape of British politics. Within a decade, the Liberal Party had surrendered its place as one of the two governing parties to a working-class movement led by men with no government experience and barely a university degree between them.

In his 1921 pamphlet From Liberalism to Labour, Trevelyan explained that his defection was motivated not by policy disagreement but by his conviction that an exhausted Liberal Party could offer nothing that his socialist future required.

Whether Robert Jenrick’s defection will come to be viewed in a similar light remains to be seen. For the political and media classes, it offered the usual fare of pantomime and intrigue. But for Jenrick and his new colleagues at Reform, it suggests something else altogether: the decline and fall of the oldest and most electorally successful party in political history. And their conviction is that what is collapsing is not just the Conservative Party but the entire cosmopolitan mindset that dominated western politics from 1945 to 2016.

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