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Robert Jenrick Nigel Farage says he ‘can’t even manage a five-a-side team’ because of his criticize British reforms in audio leaked last year.
Mr Jenrick defected to reform Britain on Thursday, He declared the country needed Mr Farage, hours after he was dramatically sacked from the Conservative frontbench. “Planning secretly”.
But in audio leaked in March 2025, Mr Jenrick can be heard criticizing his new boss and dismissing Reform as “not a serious party”.
“Ultimately our party will save this country,” he said in a recording. telegraph At a dinner held by the Aldridge-Brownhills Conservative Association.
“It’s not Labour, it’s not the Lib Dems, it’s not actually Reform. I mean, we’ve just seen in the last two weeks that Nigel Farage can’t even run a five-a-side team, so he can’t run a country.
“They are not a serious party. We may sympathize with some of the things they say. We may understand why millions of our fellow citizens are moving toward reform, but they are not the answer.”
However, on Thursday, Mr Jenrick took a different stance, saying most of his former Tory colleagues had “no appetite for the radical change this country needs”.
Sitting next to Farage at the Westminster press conference, he instead urged others to “unite now to support Nigel and reform”.
“I’ll tell you in the blink of an eye, I want Nigel to be our prime minister after the next election,” he said.
“This is the only way we can save our country, so patriotic people who share my views must now unite behind Nigel and the reforms.”
Kemi Badenoch announced in a post on X (Twitter) on Thursday that she would sack Mr Jenrick from the shadow cabinet, remove the party whip and suspend him from the party.
She said: “I have been given clear and irrefutable evidence that he is secretly plotting to defect with the aim of doing as much damage as possible to his shadow cabinet colleagues and the wider Conservative Party.”
A mole in Jenrick’s team is believed to have passed on a draft of his resignation speech and his planned defection to Reform Britain’s media plans after it emerged the document was found “all over the place”.
But Mr Farage said Ms Badenoch had been “too hasty” and Mr Jenrick “might not have joined at all” if she had not acted first.
He will join Reform UK’s “front team” with five other MPs, including Danny Kruger, who became the first Conservative MP to defect in September.