Will What’s Left of the British Conservative Party Be Worth Saving?
4th February 2026
Hint: No.
The stream of Tories jumping ship to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK shows no sign of abating. Amid Reform’s fresh new recruits, the defection of Suella Braverman stands apart. In my opinion, she is likely to add several percentage points to Reform’s vote share immediately—not through any sudden mass conversion, but by crystallising the disillusionment among the Conservative base that has been building since the 2024 wipeout.
There is tentative evidence to support this, for instance, a recent YouGov poll suggesting that around a quarter of 2024 Tory voters now view Reform more favourably following the Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick defections. Furthermore, Rishi Sunak’s sacking of Braverman back in November 2023 coincided with a sharp rise in the Reform vote.
Those who ‘switch sides’ in any walk of life can expect a degree of censure, but political defections are almost impossible to pull off without violent condemnation. For we ask a great deal of our politicians: loyalty to country, to party, to a manifesto they likely had little or no hand in drafting, and above all to principle—even when many if not all of those things are unaligned. Few of us would satisfy such a test in any 24-hour period. Braverman, however—a paid-up Conservative for the best part of thirty years—might just make the grade.
The British Conservative party hasn’t been worth a shit during my lifetime, certainly, and probably within the lifetime of my father, who was born in 1918. Time to take Old Yeller out back and shoot him.