Robert Jenrick has launched a sustained assault on Kemi Badenoch, casting the Conservative leader as emblematic of a metropolitan elite and describing a coalition with his former party as being like “handcuffed to a zombie”.
Reform UK’s economics spokesperson applied the “Kensington Kemi” label to Badenoch repeatedly, arguing that her party serves people who lament the decline of Mayfair clubs and struggle to find the ingredients for an Ottolenghi recipe.
The remarks arrive as relations between the Conservatives and Reform deteriorate further. Jenrick accused his old party of issuing “bungs for Belgravia” after the Tories said at their autumn conference that they would exempt property from inheritance tax and widen free childcare to higher earners if elected.
Badenoch’s approval ratings among the public have improved, and the criticism from Jenrick lands against that backdrop. At the Conservative conference he was widely mocked, appearing in several places on a satirical Bayeux tapestry of the political landscape depicted as a crying baby. He was ejected from the party in January over plans to defect.
In her conference speech, Badenoch flatly rejected any “unite the right” arrangement with Reform, asking who would want to ally with a party that had made her British-born mixed-race children feel they were not English.
Nigel Farage, who leads Reform, played down the prospect of a post-election pact on Thursday, calling it “extremely unlikely”. Jenrick struck a harder tone at his Friday press conference, describing the Conservatives as “nothing more than a metropolitan pressure group for the wealthiest” and comparing a tie-up to being “handcuffed to a zombie”.
“Kensington Kemi knows who her people are. Millionaires, not Mansfield,” Jenrick said. “The wealthy, not workers. She’s for people who complain that Mayfair clubs aren’t what they used to be. For people who struggle to find all the ingredients for that Ottolenghi recipe. And people whose lives have got almost nothing in common with my constituents in Newark.”
Jenrick attacked the Tories for having “retreated into the hinterland of Kensington and Chelsea”, despite several senior Reform figures having lived in the area. Farage rented a house in Kensington and Chelsea during the Brexit years, paid for by the leave donor Arron Banks. Nick Candy, the party’s honorary treasurer and a property billionaire, sold his £275m Chelsea mansion this year.
Last year Farage announced a policy designed to appeal specifically to billionaires, offering them a flat £250,000 tax rate for non-dom status in order to attract the wealthy to London, and he bemoaned the “very rapid exodus” from central London and how it was “tough to sell a house” in Kensington and Chelsea.
Farage is famously a member of the exclusive Mayfair club 5 Hertford Street, while the party held its fundraiser at the trendy Oswald’s in Mayfair last year.
Asked whether Reform was also the party of billionaires, Jenrick said it was focused on delivering tax cuts for 40 million middle earners.
Jenrick also faced questions about suggestions by Reform figures that Badenoch could not be English because of her Nigerian heritage. He said the debate was “pretty overblown” and that it was possible to distinguish ethnicity, cultural identity and citizenship.
“Is there such a thing as the English ethnicity? Yes. Not always easy to define,” he said. “That is different from national identity. That is whether or not you ascribe to, you assimilate to, our heritage, our culture, our norms, our manners. And that is also different to whether or not you have a British passport in your bedroom drawer.”
He said he was most concerned about people who had a British passport but “do not love our country”.
Jenrick went on to defend his comments about the “Islamification” of the UK, which have now been reported to the police and the Prevent counter-radicalisation programme. He did not address the police reports, but he doubled down by saying there had been an increase in the use of sharia law, and in instances of young girls being forced to cover their faces, and churches being turned into mosques, which he said would not happen under a Reform government.
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