Berry's defection to Reform is the latest sign it is a joke party

Telegraph

10-07-2025

What shall we make of Sir Jake Berry's defection from the Tories to Reform UK? It is an interesting culmination of a political career that has taken Berry – in no short amount of time – from serving in David Cameron's Number 10 Policy Unit, to performative Boris Johnson loyalism, to a blissful seven weeks as Liz Truss's Party Chairman. Not to mention losing his seat after two years of backbench mildewing, backing Tom Tugendhat for the party's leadership, and then plonking himself in that natural berth for the politically exhausted and terminally irrelevant: TalkTV.
Apropos of nothing, online swingometers now have Berry's former seat going to Reform by quite a healthy margin. In fairness to the voters of Rossendale and Darwen, they have obvious reasons to want to put a plague on the houses of both major parties – reasons that Berry sharply identified in his article announcing his defection. He was blunt: 'If you were deliberately trying to wreck the country, you'd be hard pressed to do a better job than the last two decades of Labour and Tory rule'.
Our streets are lawless, migration is out of control, and taxes are going through the roof. Britain is broken, it needs reform, and Nigel Farage is the man to deliver it – just as, erm, one assumes Tugendhat was last summer.
With Berry's defection, Reform gain a former MP with several years of ex-ministerial experience at a junior level – as Minister of State for the Northern Powerhouse (remember that?) – and over a decade in the Commons.
They get someone with considerable organisational experience, brio, and a suitably firm line on the culture wars. But it is hard to get too excited about Berry's switch. He is not a political heavyweight. His loss from the Commons was not mourned by many. And his post-parliamentary career has suggested little more than a desperate desire to remain relevant.
In Berry's defence, he has never been anything less than enthusiastic. He set up the party's Northern Research Group to support MPs in the North and Midlands – areas that deserted the party at the last election. He was vocal in trying to bridge the gap between the party leadership and its members, and in trying to reclaim a reputation for being the party of lower taxes that we never should have lost.
He swung back and forth on Rishi Sunak, depending on how much attention the former Prime Minister paid to him. But like so many, he will be forever devalued by his association with Truss.
Let me be plain. Berry's career has been a combination of shameless careerism with an unfortunate tendency to throw his toys out of the pram. Berry is one of those ex-Tory MPs – like fellow defector Andrea Jenkyns – who never got over the fact that the leaders they put so much stock in – Johnson, the 49-Day Queen, or both – were hopeless at the job.
He rated his political nous rather more than quite a few of his colleagues did; his knighthood was the latest depressing sign that the honours system is becoming a joke. His defection will generate a little heat, and no light.
I am far from being Kemi Badenoch's biggest fan. But the Tory leader and myself would both agree that Berry's defection is no great loss. If the choice was between having Berry sniping from the sidelines and descending into ever-greater irrelevance while still nominally a Conservative, or sniping from the sidelines and descending into ever-greater irrelevance as a Farage fanboy, the latter is much easier to handle.
When Reform have been taking Tory defectors, they have not been taking our best. Berry's defection is the latest sign that they are a joke party, populated by loudmouths and attention-seekers.
That they are leading in the polls is no accident. Berry is right to suggest that Britain is broken, that the public are fed up, and that radical change is needed. But someone so associated with the last fourteen years – and so tarnished by his indelible association with our worst ever Prime Minister – is hardly the man to deliver it.
Until you have current and former Tory MPs of genuine stature going teal – and I won't embarrass them here by naming names – it is hard to take Farage's motley crew seriously as a vehicle for fixing the country. Like Farage himself, Berry is yesterday's man.