Conservative Party defectors are swelling the ranks of the British far right

London"You need to wake up; your party is dying." This was the warning issued this Wednesday during the weekly government question time. premier Keir Starmer lashed out at British Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch.

With the wounds from the Epstein case still bleedingWhile his tenure was threatened, the British Prime Minister was thus defending himself against the opposition's attacks. The Conservatives had emphasized the two recent resignations at Downing Street as a response to the scandal that has erupted over the discovery of [unspecified information]. in the millions of files of the pedophile published by the United States Department of Justice that the ambassador to Washington appointed in January 2025 According to Starmer, Peter Mandelson had leaked critical executive information to the financier in 2009.

With his counterattack, the prime minister was referring to the recent continued defections of the Tories With which the ultra-conservative and Trump-supporting Nigel Farage is swelling the ranks of the Reform Party, currently seven points ahead in the polls for a hypothetical general election. Starmer went even further: "In January, you said there would be no more defections in your party. Forty-eight hours later, the Shadow Foreign Secretary defected. And eight days after that, the former Home Secretary did the same. Now, the only pertinent question is: who will be next?" He was referring to Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman, two Conservative heavyweights who have left the party.

The laughter on the Labour benches was quite loud, perhaps to drown out the turmoil within the party itself, which is still sharpening its scythe in case it needs to oust Starmer's boss, a decision that will be made in the coming weeks, depending on a by-election that will take place at the end of this month alongside the Manch local elections. and Scotland, on May 7th.

The great traitor is named Churchill

The most famous defector in British politics is also its most famous prime minister. Winston Churchill left the Conservative Party in 1904 to join the Liberals, and twenty years later he reversed course to return to the party he had come from. When he arrived at 10 Downing Street in 1940, the country was at war, and no one remembered his political shifts. And, probably, he himself had forgotten that in 1903 had written in a letter —which he never sent, but which is preserved in the museum dedicated to Fulton in the United States—in which he detested his own party: "I am an English liberal. I hate the Conservative Party, its men, its words, its methods."

A century and a bit after Churchill's comings and goings, Suella Braverman, one of the most high-profile politicians of the Tories during the governments of Liz Truss (2022) and Rishi Sunak (2022-2024), for his anti-immigrant crusade from the Ministry of the Interior, he starred in one of the high-profile defections referred to in the premier Starmer: now abandoning the conservatives in the Reform Party. Braverman jumped ship that seems to be taking on water from all sides to embrace the hard right wing he represents Farage, one of the main architects of Brexit along with Boris Johnson.

The former minister became the third defection of the year from the Tories to the supposedly radical members of the Reform Party. Because, as political scientist Thomas Lockwood of the University of York argues, the party "risks absorbing so many former Conservatives that it may begin to resemble the establishment it denounces." And he adds: "This wave of recruitment dilutes the insurgent brand" with which Nigel Farage has thus far presented himself to British society.

The data is conclusive. From the general elections of July 2024Five MPs who won their seats as Conservatives have left the party to join Farage's. In addition, 22 former MPs have made the same move in the same period. The latest defection so far. tory-reform The number of reformist MPs in the House of Commons has increased to eight. And on the stage where she announced the decision, Suella Braverman echoed the words of Robert Jenrick, one of her coalition partners in Rishi Sunak's government, who in mid-January had taken the same step, justifying himself by saying that the United Kingdom is a "broken" country and that the only possible solution lies alone.

Bad memory

Braverman also commented that joining the Reform Party was like "coming home," a pointed rebuke to leader Kemi Badenoch, whom he accused of having so distorted the spirit of her former party that it is unrecognizable. As an initial response to the defection, in a statement they later withdrew, the Tories They entered treacherous territory: "It was always a question of when, not if, Suella would defect. We Conservatives have done everything possible to look after her mental health, but it was clear she was very unhappy," a reference to the former minister's possible psychological problems that was very poorly received by the vast majority of MPs, even Labour MPs.

In her speech, Braverman didn't hold back in her attacks on her former comrades: "The time has come to admit defeat. I am on the right. Proudly on the right of British politics. But the right has lost the battle for the Conservative Party, a left-wing social democratic party made up of Conservatives in name only."

Her words not only reveal her extremism but also a selective amnesia. Because she, Jenrick, and all the defectors who have preceded them come from the same party that has governed the United Kingdom uninterrupted from 2010 to 2024; Just as, under his own watch, he ended up leaving the country in ruins, according to the former shadow foreign minister.

The trickle of conservatives into the Reform Party has an expiration date, according to Nigel Farage. The leader of a one-man party, which is a limited company, has set the date of the aforementioned May 7 elections as the last time he will accept ToriesThe reason is very simple: polls predict an unstoppable rise of the populist far right, which he personifies, and after what may be a sweep of the conservatives –and also from Labour, especially in Wales And in Scotland—the Reform Party leader wouldn't want his party to start looking like "a rescue charity for every panicking Conservative MP." As across Europe, including Spain and the United States, the right's roadmap is clear: adopt far-right policies.