Tory-Reform pact ‘like being handcuffed to a zombie’, says Jenrick

Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick has said a pact with the Conservatives would be like “being handcuffed to a zombie”.

The party’s Treasury spokesman insisted Reform is not interested in such an agreement, just a day after its leader Nigel Farage refused to rule it out.

Mr Farage told the Press Association on Thursday a pact before the next election is “extremely unlikely”, but added: “After an election, who’s to say?”

It came after Kemi Badenoch used her Conservative Party conference speech on Wednesday to reject the idea of a deal, saying: “To those who say ‘unite the right’, we are not uniting with that.”

Speaking to reporters on Friday, Mr Jenrick said: “The Tories ruling out a deal with Reform is like me saying to Thomas Tuchel that I’m ruling out being selected for the England squad versus Croatia.

“I mean, doing a deal with the Tory party is like being handcuffed to a zombie. It’s not something we’re interested in, trust me.”

Mr Jenrick also declined to answer whether he regards Mrs Badenoch as English after former home secretary Suella Braverman, a Reform MP, suggested on the BBC’s Question Time programme that non-white people born in the UK could be British, but not English.

Mrs Badenoch said in her conference speech: “I don’t want to live in a country run by people who threaten journalists… and debate whether my mixed-race children are English.

“I don’t want to explain to my son when we’re watching our brilliant England team play football that some people don’t think our black players are English.”

Mr Jenrick said on Friday he thought the issue was “overblown”, but did not answer when directly asked whether he views Mrs Badenoch as English.

He said: “With respect to this debate that seems to have happened at the moment about Englishness, I think this is pretty overblown.

“I’ve spoken about this many, many times. It’s pretty straightforward, as far as I’m concerned.

“There are three things: there’s ethnicity, there’s cultural identity, and there’s citizenship.

“Is there such a thing as English ethnicity? Yes. Not always easy to define, like any country barring the most closed societies, we’ve been a fluid country, but we’ve had a broadly stable population for much of the last 1,000 years, at least from the period from 1066 to the 1960s.

“That is different from national identity. That is whether or not you ascribe to, you assimilate to our history, our heritage, our culture, our norms, our manners, and that in turn is also different to whether or not you have a British passport in your bedroom drawer.

“Those three things can be the same, or they can be different.

“What worries me the most is that there are some people now in this country who have the passport in their drawer, but do not seem to have accepted and assimilated into our culture, do not love this country.

“That is what Reform cares about. We are on the side of everyone in this country who loves Britain, wants the best for this country, and shares our strong national identity.”

Mr Jenrick also dismissed the parliamentary standards inquiry into Mr Farage’s failure to declare a £5 million donation, saying “what really matters” is the Reform leader’s safety, not “form-filling in the House of Commons”.

He told reporters: “What we have seen in the last few weeks provides, I think, everyone with the context to what happened earlier in the year and last year.

“Nigel appears to have been hunted by a terrorist, and his family placed in the gravest danger.

“If people are going to argue about whether he should or shouldn’t have reported that, I mean that’s up to them.

“But we should all have, I think, the greatest sympathy for him and his family, and we should be doing everything we can to protect him, his family, and their security.

“That is what really matters, not form-filling in the House of Commons.”

Asked about the by-election result in Holborn and St Pancras, in which Green Party leader Zack Polanski came second and Reform UK came fourth, Mr Jenrick said: “On the Green Party, I think they got what they deserved last night, and I abhor the rhetoric that’s come out of them in recent times.”