As Berry defects to Reform, the Conservative Party must decide what to do about former MPs

I have two abiding memories of Sir Jake Berry, the former Conservative Party MP and onetime chairman who last night announced his defection to Reform UK.

The first, some years ago, was when his office got in touch to ask for a meeting and when, a few days later, we met, he asked me why I wanted to see him.

More recent and more significant was the 2023 conference of the Northern Research Group of Tory MPs, which he founded and led. In his main speech at Doncaster racecourse, Sir Jake joined the chorus of Red Wall MPs demanding some variation on “full fiscal devolution for the North”.

Given that the titular focus of the conference was ‘levelling up’, and that levelling up was usually interpreted as higher levels of Westminster spending (sorry, investment) in left-behind areas, it was quite startling to see representative after representative for areas with enormous fiscal transfer deficits call for their region to be cast back hard on its own resources.

Whether that was accelerationist libertarianism or innumeracy I never quite found out. Perhaps it’s going to appear in the next Reform manifesto.

It will certainly be interesting to see what impact, if any, Sir Jake has on Reform’s development. As our former colleague William Atkinson notes in today’s Telegraph, he has “considerable organisational experience, brio, and a suitably firm line on the culture wars”, not to mention putting considerable effort into the particular political question of the North, where Reform now has a lot of prospects (albeit, as noted above, with sometimes questionable results).

On the other hand, such is Nigel Farage’s grip on Reform – and in fairness to him, so wholly built on his appeal is the party’s popularity – that it’s difficult to see how any individual can make much of a difference. Farage does the media, Farage decides the policy. As a vehicle for returning to Parliament, however, it might do fine (Reform is now polling ahead in Sir Jake’s old seat).

That in itself is a bit of a puzzle, though. Reform is supposed to be an outsider, come to sweep away the detritus of the past twenty or thirty years. It’s all very well for Sir Jake to say that “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”, but he was part of it, and in the recent past thought the solution was Tom Tugendhat.

Obviously Farage can do most of the running in terms of keeping Reform up in the polls. But when thinking about a potential Reform government, it’s worth noting that of the five MPs returned under its colours last summer, neither of the two genuine outsiders remain in the party.

They got kicked out for different reasons, of course, yet poor candidate selection and the inability to stomach independent-minded colleagues are both facets of the same, larger problem: that Farage seems inacapable of identifying, attracting, and indeed tolerating the sort of talent you need to build a genuinely new party. The gradual tilt of the balance of his bench towards defectors is a contra-indicator of his revolutionary potential; it’s hard to staff a revolution with retreads.

Such considerations must also be on those minds at CCHQ charged with overhauling candidate selections. Following the rout at the general election we have a lot of ex-MPs, many of whom will be keen to return to the Commons. But how many should be allowed to do so? After all, it is already hard to pose as a renewed party when your shadow cabinet has quite so much experience in the previous government.

We asked our panellists one question about this in the most recent survey:

It’s an interesting result. Note that this isn’t whether or not former MPs should be automatically selected for seats – merely whether they should be able to bypass the normal process for getting on the list (whatever the new one turns out to be). Yet still only a quarter of party members thought so.

We may return to this subject in more detail as the Party’s overhaul develops, but it looks like party members are keen for new blood. Perhaps we might yet see more ex-comrades deciding that Farage offers an easier route back to the green benches.