Robert Jenrick has turned his fire on Liz Truss, claiming he urged Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch to expel the former prime minister from the party over her “careless and cackhanded” mini-budget and citing Badenoch’s refusal to do so as a key reason for his own defection to Reform UK.
Speaking to Sky News Mornings with Ridge and Frost, the former shadow justice secretary said that Truss’s disastrous 2022 mini-budget was so damaging that she should no longer be welcome in the Conservative Party at all.
“If I’d been leader of the Conservative Party and that’s obviously ancient history now I would have chucked Liz Truss out of the party,” Jenrick said. “The mini-budget was careless and cackhanded.”
He argued that the fallout went far beyond Westminster theatrics. “It did cause, in the moment, real harm to people,” he said. “People’s house sales fell through, they were worried about their mortgages, investments, their pensions. That’s wrong. That is not somebody who should be a member of your political party.”
Jenrick said he had explicitly raised the issue with Badenoch and viewed her refusal to act as emblematic of a deeper failure within the Conservatives.
“And the point I was making is, has the Conservative Party changed? I don’t believe it has,” he said. “If the party has really changed, why wouldn’t you kick Liz Truss out? You know, I’ve told Kemi to do that. She chose not to do it. And it speaks to a broader truth.”
Liz Truss resigned after just 44 days as prime minister following the market chaos unleashed by her unfunded tax cuts, widely blamed for spiking borrowing costs and destabilising the economy. She later lost her parliamentary seat at the 2024 general election a contest that ended 14 years of Conservative rule.
Jenrick himself lost to Badenoch in the subsequent Tory leadership contest. He denied that his defection to Reform UK was motivated by wounded ambition or a belief that he could no longer dislodge her.
Instead, he painted the Conservative Party as irredeemably stuck in the past. “They’ve still got the cast of characters who made those mistakes at the helm,” he said. “The arsonists are still there. Why would anyone trust them once again? And I concluded, it’s never going to change.”
While acknowledging that he bore responsibility for his own record, admitting there were “things I got wrong” and that he could have achieved more during his time handling housing, Jenrick was clear that his future leadership ambitions now lie elsewhere.
Asked whether he was prepared to abandon hopes of leading a political party, he replied: “It is my view that Nigel is a very strong leader. He is the leader of this party. There is no question of that whatsoever.”
Truss, for her part, hit back sharply. Responding on X to claims Jenrick had made about her in The Times, she wrote: “Robert Jenrick may have joined Reform, but who is he getting his orders from? Trojan horse.”
The exchange underlines the increasingly bitter fragmentation of the Conservative right, with former allies now openly accusing one another of economic recklessness, disloyalty and bad faith, even as voters continue to live with the consequences of the brief but explosive Truss experiment.
