Cabbages & Kings | What’s Behind The Rush Among Brit Political Leaders To Defect To Reform? | Farrukh Dhondy

“If love is the song of the sweet bird of youth

Is it denied as melody to the ageing crow?

Do these old sayings approach something like truth

Will common sense or wishful thinking let us know?”

— From Aur Ro Raha Bhori Ali, by Bachchoo

For several months Robert Jenrick, MP and loser in the contest to lead the Conservative Party, was suspected of wanting to defect to Reform. He vehemently denied any such ambition but last week a document leaked from his office proved to the media and to his leader Kemi (Kazi?) Badenoch that he was while jumping ship about to announce the demise and death of the Tories.

Kemi got hold of this document and Putinesquely, if only metaphorically, defenestrated him before he voluntarily jumped. His intended grenade exploded in his face.

Jenrick is wily. In 2020, as housing minister in Boris Johnson’s government, he helped his crony and Tory donor, millionaire Richard Desmond, dodge a payment of £30 million which the Tower Hamlets Council had resolved he would owe for building luxury skyscrapers on the Isle of Dogs. A day before this ruling came into effect, Jenrick signed an enabling document so that Desmond could build without paying the charge.

Another junior minister, Andrew somebody-or-other, followed Jenrick’s defection, giving Reform its seventh sitting MP. Nigel Farage, Reform’s leader, speculates that up to 20 more Tory MPs and even a senior Labourite may defect and join Reform. One of those mentioned as possible defectors is Tory Suella Braverman, whose husband Rael, seven months ago, enrolled as a member in Reform. Strangely, he quit that party in the week that Jenrick joined it. The consequence of arguments in bed?

The defections past, present and future, to Reform are undoubtedly related to the lead that Reform has in the public polls ahead of Labour, Tory, Green and Lib-Dems — by considerable margins.

This lead is certainly a result of the fact that, apart from some completely nonsensical, economically unverifiable and unviable promises to nationalise certain industries and slash the cost of living, their central and much touted winning policy is virulent anti-immigration and the deportation and other strictures on Johnny Foreigner who is already here.

Farage came to prominence as an anti-European Brexiteer as he ran the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) before joining Reform, which had been set up and led by businessman Richard Tice.

The popularity of Reform in the polls has certainly acted as a magnet attracting the defectors from the Tories, including figures such as Nadine Doris, who wasn’t an MP when she went over.

To the ordinary voter, contributing to those polls, the anti-immigrant scares and stance is certainly the determining factor. To the defectors from the Tories it is insurance against losing their seats and shameless opportunism, even though some of them try and save face by referring to some Tory policy that they don’t agree with.

That being said, if a democracy turns nasty or becomes undemocratic in several ways, legislators with any conscience and even sense would be right and courageous to cross the floor. Would anyone in the world apart from deranged maggots accuse Republican Senators and Congressman who cross the floor to join the Democrats, or even just vote with them, of opportunism?

Yes, the polls indicate that KemiKazi’s Party may be on the path to suicide, but they also indicate that Reform will attract substantial numbers of Labour voters as Sir Keir Starmer’s government has not been able to substantially recover from the damage to the economy and institutions that fourteen years of Tory rule before Labour’s victory in 2024 had left them with.

But enough about politics, let me talk about me. I have never crossed the floor -- or only the million wooden, stone or carpeted ones one encounters through life. But I have contributed to the destruction of a political “movement” by leaving it on a matter of principle.

This was in 1973 when I was a “central core” (sort of politburo without the Stalinism) of Britain’s Black Panther Movement, a group which actively fought against racism on all fronts for the advancement of, and common justice for, the new British communities of West Indians, Africans and us sub-continentals.

Several of our members lived in a north London house the BPM owned and I was summoned there to an emergency meeting of the “central core” on a Sunday.

I imagined it was to work out strategy for one of the very successful campaigns we had initiated against police discrimination, racist policies in employment, education, housing, wage-differentials, etc.

It wasn’t. The meeting had been convened as a kangaroo court because one of the young tenants who lived in the house had brought his “white” girlfriend to spend the night.

He was being treated as though he had transgressed some unwritten rule of the BPM.

I protested. We were not a moral cult, I said. His friendships or sex were his own business. I walked out of that kangaroo court. I called other members who agreed that this procedure was a perversion of the purpose of the movement and, at first, four of us quit. It led to the haemorrhaging of the membership and, finally, the BPM’s death.

Floor-crossers of the world Unite. Fat chance in the UK. The defectors to Reform are, to a man and woman, all out for themselves.