nine Tory leaders defect to Reform UK, Farage’s ultra party

Braverman is the third deputy tory in a matter of eleven days to join Farage’s formation, which increases its representation in Westminster to eight deputies after having obtained only five seats in the July 2024 general elections, which catapulted Labor Keir Starmer a Downing Street.

Braverman ended a chapter of three decades as a member of the Conservative Party, a party in low hours after fourteen years in power. The 45-year-old lawyer, who also served as attorney general during the Government of Boris Johnsonfollows in the footsteps of another prominent conservative deputy: Robert Jenrickwho unsuccessfully contested Kemi Badenoch the leadership of the party in the last primaries.

Braverman and Jenrick aren’t the only ones to jump ship. As he was responsible for remembering this very Monday Ben Riley-Smithpolitical editor of The Daily TelegraphFarage has added Boris Johnson’s chancellor to his team, Nadhim Zahawi; to his Secretary of Culture, Nadine Dorries; or to your Minister of Health, Maria Caulfield. “The old gang getting back together,” Riley-Smith writes sarcastically.

Braverman’s move doesn’t catch anyone by surprise. The betrayal was an open secret. I was upset for a while. “It was always a question of when, not if, Suella would defect,” acknowledged a spokesman for the tories.

“We Conservatives did everything we could to look after Suella’s mental health, but she was clearly very unhappy. She says she feels like she has ‘come home’, which will come as a surprise to people who decided not to elect a Reform MP in their constituency in 2024,” he added.

Braverman had lost prominence in the party, which is languishing in the polls. The distance with respect to Reform reaches ten points. The leader also suffered repudiation from Sunak, who dismissed her as Home Secretary for publishing a harsh opinion article in The Times in which he criticized the London Metropolitan Police for its handling of the pro-Palestinian protests.

Truss – who only slept at 10 Downing Street for a whopping 44 nights – had also fired her a year earlier for sending official documents from a personal email address.

Migratory obsession

This Monday, Braverman did not miss the opportunity to reiterate that the country was “broken” by immigration, a phenomenon that he considers “out of control.” “We can continue down this path of managed decline towards weakness and surrender. Or we can fix our country, take back our power, rediscover our strength,” the former Interior Minister said in front of her new followers.

The vice president of the Liberal Democrats, Daisy Cooperdid not bite his tongue when it came to answering: “Farage has recruited another Conservative minister with selective amnesia: someone who complains about a broken Britain while conveniently forgetting that she helped break it.”

Los tories They didn’t stay silent either. “There are people who are deputies because they care about their communities and want to achieve a better country. There are others who do it for their personal ambition,” the party said, recalling that Braverman “ran for leader of the conservatives in 2022 and came sixth, behind Kemi and Tom Tugendhat” and that “in 2024 she could not even gather enough support to get on the ballot.”

“Now she has decided to try her luck with Nigel Farage, who said last year that he did not want her in Reform,” said the conservative spokesperson.

In the Labor camp they try to discredit the strategy of the ultra leader, a new rival to beat. “He is filling his party with tories failures responsible for the chaos and decline that burdened the United Kingdom for fourteen years,” stressed the president of the party, Anna Turley.

Against the current

Not all the heavyweights of the Conservative Party defect to the ranks of the far right, however. There are those who still opt for the path of moderation. These are the cases of the former leader tory Scottish Ruth Davidson and of Andy Streeta former mayor of the West Midlands.

The centrist tandem presented this Monday in London the Prosper UK platform, which will seek to drag the party back towards the center and stand up to Farage’s “incredibly harmful” formation.

Both are critical of Badenoch’s approach. They consider that the leader of the opposition to Starmer has replicated the leader’s model brexiteer to prevent the flight of his electorate, something he does not seem to have achieved. But they want to lend a hand to make her “the new prime minister” of the United Kingdom.

The leadership of the Conservative Party also wanted to remember this Monday the internal crisis that Starmer’s party is going through: “As always happens with Reform, they announce defections just when the Labor Government is destroying itself: Rayner, Mandelson, now Burnham. Reform is too busy opposing the Conservatives to hold the Labor Government accountable.”