Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has insisted Britain is not broken after her former shadow minister Robert Jenrick criticised the party for failing to campaign on that line.
She wrote in the Daily Telegraph: “Ours is still one of the most successful, resilient and influential countries on Earth,” adding that telling voters their “country is finished” only “drags them down”.
She also insisted that the Conservatives were stronger after she sacked Jenrick hours before he defected to Reform.
Jenrick told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg in an interview on Friday that a shadow cabinet meeting in which colleagues had failed to agree that the country was broken had been the final straw for him.
In her editorial, Badenoch said there were problems in the UK, some of which were getting worse, but that the country’s best days laid ahead.
She insisted the Conservatives were best placed to offer solutions to the country’s problems, saying that Reform were destined to fail as they welcomed “toxic people” who “destroy organisations”.
“A movement built on grievance and serial disloyalty is doomed to fail, and they will be at each other’s throats soon enough,” the opposition leader wrote.
In a separate editorial in the Daily Express, Badenoch said “some things in Britain are broken, but they are not broken beyond repair”.
She also criticised politicians who “talk Britain down instead of showing they have a plan to build it back up”.
Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice praised Jenrick as “the only cabinet minister who resigned on a matter of principle from the Conservative government” in an interview with BBC Newsnight on Friday.
He was referencing Jenrick’s decision to resign from Rishi Sunak’s government over his view that it was not going far enough to find a solution to fast-rising immigration levels.
Tice continued: “That makes him uniquely qualified to actually to explain where things went so badly wrong on both legal and illegal immigration, which is to the fury of tens of millions of British people.”
He told BBC Breakfast on Saturday that Jenrick had “tremendous experience, and we’ve been criticised for not having the experience to be able to govern and manage things – and now we bring in someone with that experience and we’re still being criticised”.
Badenoch said that Jenrick’s defection “was never about principle, it was about ambition” and “every criticism he now makes occurred when he was in government”.
The Tories are now a “stronger and more united team”, she wrote.
Badenoch hopes her sacking Jenrick will strengthen her position as Tory leader and make her look decisive.
But Reform now has a new, prominent MP who is intent on publicising what he sees are the many mistakes of his former party.