Robert Jenrick said Nigel Farage “can’t even run a five-a-side” team as he criticised Reform UK in leaked audio from last year.
Mr Jenrick defected to Reform UK on Thursday, declaring that the country needs Mr Farage, hours after he was dramatically sacked from the Conservative frontbench for “secretly plotting” the move.
But in leaked audio from March 2025, Mr Jenrick can be heard criticising his new boss and dismissing Reform UK as “not a serious party”.
“It’s ultimately our party that is going to rescue this country,” he said in a recording obtained by The Telegraph at a dinner at the Aldridge-Brownhills Conservative Association.
“It’s not the Labour Party, it’s not the Lib Dems, it’s not actually Reform either. I mean, we’ve just seen in the last fortnight that Nigel Farage can’t even run a five-a-side team, so he’s not going to be able to run a country.
“They’re not a serious party. We may have sympathy with some of the things that they say. We may understand why millions of our fellow countrymen and women have gone to Reform, but they are not the answer.”
On Thursday, however, Mr Jenrick took a different stance, saying most of his former Tory colleagues “don’t have the stomach for the radical change this country needs”.
Sitting beside Mr Farage at a Westminster press conference, he instead urged others to “rally behind Nigel and Reform right now”.
“It does not take me one blink of an eyelid to say to you that I want Nigel to be our prime minister after the next general election,” he said.
“That is the only way we will save our country, and so patriotic people who share my views have to rally behind Nigel and Reform right now.”
Kemi Badenoch announced she was sacking Mr Jenrick from the shadow cabinet, removing the whip and suspending his party membership in a post on X (Twitter) on Thursday.
“I was presented with clear, irrefutable evidence that he was plotting in secret to defect in a way designed to be as damaging as possible to his shadow cabinet colleagues and the wider Conservative Party,” she said.
A mole in Mr Jenrick’s team is believed to have passed on a draft of his resignation speech and media plan for his planned defection to Reform UK, according to reports, after earlier suggestions that the document had been found “lying around”.
But Mr Farage said Ms Badenoch had “jumped the gun” and that Mr Jenrick “might not have joined at all” had she not made a move first.
He will join Reform UK’s “frontline team” alongside five other MPs, including Danny Kruger, who became the first sitting Conservative MP to defect to the party in September.
Source: UK Politics - www.independent.co.uk
