Asked about reports a mole in his own team leaked his draft defection speech to Badenoch, Jenrick said he was told “a junior person” did this but he had already decided to join Reform beforehand.

Jenrick claimed he made the final decision to defect over Christmas, before he was sacked by Badenoch, although he said he had been in discussions with Farage for some time.

He said the “final straw” was at a shadow cabinet away day around a week ago, when there was a discussion about whether Britain was broken, with the party’s position that it was not.

Jenrick said some people in the room argued “Britain is broken, but we can’t say it because it was a Conservative Party that broke it”, while others claimed it was not.

“The arsonists were still in control of the party,” he said, adding that those who had made mistakes in government were still in the shadow cabinet.

“This was not a party that was capable of even understanding what it had got wrong, let alone fixing it.”

Defending his own record as a housing and immigration minister, Jenrick said he “always tried to challenge the system”.

At the Home Office, he said he found “a total bin fire” but “worked like crazy to try and fix that”.

“When I couldn’t persuade the government to do more, I resigned,” he said, referencing his decision to quit Rishi Sunak’s government for not going far enough to tackle illegal immigration.

However, Labour Party chairwoman Anna Turley said Jenrick was “one of the arsonists who inflicted chaos and decline on Britain while the Tories were in government”.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said: “People are fed up of hearing that Britain is broken from the very people like Robert Jenrick and Nigel Farage who broke it in the first place.

“Robert Jenrick was a Conservative health minister who helped wreck the NHS, while Nigel Farage championed Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal which damaged the economy and increased the cost of living.”

Badenoch insisted the Conservatives were the only party focused on the issues affecting the public, adding: “People are sick and tired of psychodrama.”

“The people who were posing problems in the Conservative Party are leaving. They are doing my spring cleaning for me,” she said.