THE RIGHT STUFF? BADENOCH UNDER PRESSURE AS ROSINDELL FLIRTS WITH FARAGE ALLIANCE
Kemi Badenoch's party conference in Manchester is off to a turbulent start — and not because of Labour hecklers. One of her own shadow ministers, Andrew Rosindell, has just handed Nigel Farage the kind of publicity Reform UK usually has to buy Facebook ads for.
In a GB News interview, the Romford MP declared that the Conservatives should "work together" with Reform, warning that his own seat would "almost certainly" fall to Farage's insurgent outfit if the right stayed divided.
"Our electoral system can't accommodate two parties that are broadly conservative," he said. "That means a divide in the vote and the calamity of another Labour government for five years — or even worse, one propped up by the Liberal Democrats, Greens, Plaid Cymru, SNP, fruit and nut, and whoever else."
That fruity flourish aside, Rosindell's message was clear: unite or die. He praised both Farage and Badenoch as "good patriots", lamenting that "everybody that's in Reform today pretty much would have been part of the Conservative Party" under Thatcher.
For a shadow foreign minister to publicly muse about joining forces with Farage was always going to cause a storm — and it did. A Liberal Democrat spokesperson immediately called for Badenoch to "sack Andrew Rosindell now if she wants to maintain any credibility", adding:
"It's no wonder so many One Nation Conservatives are abandoning their party and turning to the Liberal Democrats."
The timing couldn't be worse. Reform is now 15 points ahead of the Conservatives according to The Telegraph's tracker, with Labour and even the Lib Dems overtaking the once-dominant Tory brand. Rosindell admitted he's "worried" about losing his seat, predicting "the whole of Essex would go Reform."
Adding insult to injury, one of Badenoch's own backers, businessman Mark Gallagher, defected to Reform just as the conference opened — despite donating £2,000 to her leadership bid last year. The Tories scrambled to downplay it, insisting he'd "never actually rejoined" the party after backing the Brexit Party.
But the optics were ugly: another donor gone, another MP speaking like a Farage fan club chairman. Even former Tory minister Nadine Dorries, now proudly Reform, accused Badenoch of "jumping on the bandwagon" by promising to deport 150,000 illegal migrants a year and quit the European Convention on Human Rights — both Reform policies.
"I trust the man who has said this for decades," Dorries sneered, "not the woman who's said it for five minutes."
The Tory leadership insists it won't merge, defect, or deal — but when your MPs are openly begging for a right-wing "removals force" and your donors are removing themselves, it's hard to tell who's deporting whom.
For now, Badenoch is trying to steady the ship — but with her shadow ministers going rogue and her rivals going mainstream, the Conservative conference feels less like a relaunch and more like a reverse takeover.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
"He's a good man. He's a patriot. So is Kemi Badenoch. Why can't they talk to each other and work together?" — Andrew Rosindell, Shadow Foreign Minister, GB News Interview
VERDICT:
When a party starts fantasising about electoral pacts, it's usually admitting it can't win one.
