If Jake Berry is the answer, what's the question?

New Statesman​

5 days ago

Few who were there will quickly forget the 2022 Conservative Party conference in Birmingham. After a tropically hot leadership race summer, beginning with the collapse of Boris Johnson's government in June, punctuated by sweaty candidate launches in feverish think tank offices over the following weeks, and terminating in the surreal spectacle of Liz Truss's uninspired victory speech to a Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre audience of stone-faced Tory MPs in September, the party gathered in Birmingham to tear itself to shreds.
The aforementioned Queen had died – of natural causes. The British economy died around the same time – murdered by Kwasi Kwarteng's mini budget. The Chancellor himself would not survive conference. An argument about scrapping the 45p tax rate descended into farce over the four days. Multiple ministers providing multiple interpretations of the policy. Jacob Rees-Mogg haunted the fringe, like a bad folk memory vomited up from the 19th century, cracking jokes about sending children back up the chimneys. Suella Braverman talked about her dream: A Telegraph front page exclaiming the first successful deportation flight to Rwanda. Truss had been Prime Minister for mere weeks, yet the sound of ministerial jostling to hack her out of Downing Street was audible in Birmingham. The stage scenery of the Conservative Party was being removed. Without it, the party was naked and vulnerable and, frankly, confusing. The Conservatives no longer appeared to know what Conservatism was anymore. The public still haven't forgiven them for their impudence, and punished them accordingly less than 18 months later.
Of no help at all as the party descended into self-defeating blather was Jake Berry, its then chairman and minister without portfolio. In Birmingham, Berry's laboured attempts to calm things down were a painful sideshow, largely hidden by the greater pain of his more famous colleagues. But still. Berry managed to spend a Sunday of media appearances defending the end of the 45p rate only for it to be retracted by Kwarteng hours later on Monday morning. Berry also made it clear that any of his colleagues who failed to back the mini-budget in an eventual parliamentary vote should lose the whip. On Sky News Berry suggested, in a sub-Norman Tebbit moment, that families being immiserated by high energy bills, 'can either cut their consumption, get a higher salary, or go out there and get that new job'.
'He's probably our worst performing cabinet minister so far – one disaster per utterance,' a former minister told the Guardian. 'Even Kwasi has a better record.' Berry fled the chairmanship when Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, two weeks after he recieved his knighthood.
Yesterday evening Sir Jake Berry reappeared in a new guise: as a member of Reform. He joined eleven other ex-Tory MPs who have fled to the party including Lee Anderson, Dame Andrea Jenkyns, Anne Marie Morris, Macro Longhi, David Jones, Alan Amos, Michael Brown, Aiden Burley, Chris Butler and the indestructible Ann Widdecombe.
Berry, an MP during every year of the Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak governments who held several ministerial posts as well as chairing the Northern Research Group, said that the Tories had 'lost their way'. He was also, before the referendum, a Remainer. It's a bit like serving five tours in Vietnam and deciding that maybe Ho Chi Minh had a point all along. Intellectually justifiable, but perhaps a bit late in the day: you might have been more advised to discover your views mid-way through your second tour of duty.
Why are Reform leading the polls? Why do those polls show the North, Midlands and the Coasts turning teal in 2029. Because Reform are not the Conservative Party or the Labour Party. They do not have a record of failure that stretches back to 1997. Farage, once toxic, is still less toxic than what Reform voters are encouraged to call 'the Uniparty'.
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It might be fun – and in the short-term advantageous – for Reform to welcome Tory defectors. Kemi Badenoch's low speed, low energy, low ambition leadership is going nowhere. Defections only underline that further by deepening the awkward embarassment so many Conservatives, whether they are MPs or members, feel about their leader.
But if too many former Conservative MPs with, lets face it, hardly sparkling records or reputations, join Reform they risk losing their essential advantage over Labour and the Tories. If you are one of Reform's new members, or even one of its old ones, why should Jake Berry get parachuted into what will likely by a very safe seat for your party in 2029? Why should somebody at the coalface of fourteen years of failure be welcomed up into the air of your new party?
Berry's announcement was welcomed by Nigel Farage. As with so many of the short-term moves made by Reform's leader in recent months, it raises one of the most important questions in British politics today: does Nigel Farage have understand what he is doing? If Reform is joining the Uniparty, what's the point of Reform?
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