Politics

Full list of Conservative politicians who have defected to Reform UK, including Robert Jenrick

Jan 19
Written by Sophie Perry

Former Conservative MP Robert Jenrick (L) and Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage (R) greet each other as they hold a press conference to announce Mr Jenrick’s defection to Reform UK on January 15, 2026 in London, (Carl Court/Getty Images)

Former Conservative MP Robert Jenrick (L) and Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage (R) greet each other as they hold a press conference to announce Mr Jenrick's defection to Reform UK on January 15, 2026 in London, (Carl Court/Getty Images)

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has said parliamentary defectors have until 7 May to decide if want to jump ship to the right-wing, anti-immigration party, a deadline that comes after two more Tories ditched Kemi Badenoch’s shrinking opposition.

“Indeed, any elected politician who wants to play a part in our movement and help turn Britain around has until that date to apply to join Reform,” Farage wrote in The Telegraph of the deadline, saying after that the door will be shut to current and former MPs, as well as councillors.

“Now is the time to decide: do you want to go down with the failed politics of the past, or go forward with Reform UK – the party of hope, optimism and change?”

Farage’s comments come after both Robert Jenrick and Andrew Rosindell announced they would be joining Reform from the Conservatives.

Reform UK is a right-wing populist political party that was founded in 2018, originally as the Brexit Party before rebranding as Reform, and is well-known for its anti-immigration and eurosceptic policies.

The party has a poor track record when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights, with the party’s policy pledge, entitled “Our contract with you”, attacking “divisive, ‘woke’ ideology”, claiming “transgender indoctrination is causing irreversible harm to children” and vowing to ban so-called “transgender ideology” in schools, alongside stating social media platforms “push baseless transgender ideology and divisive Critical Race theory”.

Farage himself has courted criticism for his LGBTQ+ views, as in July 2025 he branded equal marriage “wrong” and said – ironically given has been married and separated from two women – that “the most stable relationships tend to be between men and women”.

In recent months, as Reform continued to gain popularity in the polls alongside Zack Polanski’s Greens, several Conservative politicians, including sitting MPs, have defected to Farage’s party.

Here is the full list:

Sitting MPs

Several Conservative MPs currently sitting in parliament have defected to Reform (GOV)

Lee Anderson

Ashfield MP Lee Anderson, who picked up the moniker ’30p Lee’ for his comments about food poverty, was the first Tory to switch allegiance to Reform and became the party’s first MP.

He defected in March 2024, a month after he had the Tory whip suspended over comments made about mayor of London Sadiq Khan that the Conservative party deemed Islamophobic.

“It’s not controversial to fight back in the culture war, a culture war that is sweeping our nation,” Anderson said when he joined the party.

“But now like millions of people in this country, I feel that we are slowly giving our country away. We are giving away our way of life. We are allowing people to erase our history. We are giving up our streets to a minority of people who literally hate our way of life. We are letting people into our country that will never integrate or adopt our British values.”

Anderson previously faced controversy in February 2023, when he was still a Tory MP, after he said that in order to win the next general election the Conservatives needed to fight it on “mix of culture wars and trans debate”.

Danny Kruger

Danny Kruger, who represents East Wiltshire and is the son of The Great British Bake Off’s Prue Leith, was the second Tory to defect to Reform and joined Farage’s party in September 2025.

“There have been moments when I have been very proud to belong to the Tory party” Kruger said at a press conference announcing his defection. “The rule of our time in office was failure.

“Bigger government, social decline, lower wages, higher taxes and less of what ordinary people actually wanted.”

He continued: “This is my tragic conclusion, the Conservative Party is over, over as a national party, over as the principal opposition to the left.”

Back in 2020, Kruger was criticised for comparing NHS gender clinic for trans youth to “Wonderland” or “1984”, claiming: “Lewis Carroll described a child perplexed by the antics of grownups living in an alternative reality. The Tavistock NHS Clinic, where children are told they can be the sex they want to be and given puberty-blocking hormone treatments, is our Wonderland.”

Robert Jenrick

Newark MP Robert Jenrick was the first of two defections in January 2026, who joined the party just hours after he was sacked from the shadow cabinet by Badenoch – who accused him of plotting to leave the Tories.

In a press conference announcing him joining Reform, Jenrick lambasted the Tories and said they “broke” Britain and “betrayed its voters”.

“It’s time for the truth,” Jenrick said during his speech. “Britain has been in decline. Britain is in decline.”

“Both Labour and the Conservatives broke Britain,” he continued. “And both are now dominated by those without the competence or backbone needed to fix it.”

Andrew Rosindell

Andrew Rosindell, who represents Romford, was the second Tory to join Reform in January 2026.

He said the Conservatives were “irreparably bound to the mistakes of previous governments” and were not taking “meaningful accountability” for past mistakes.

“Our country has endured a generation of managed decline,” he said in a post on X announcing his departure from Badenoch’s party. “Radical action is now required to reverse the damaging decisions of the past and to forge a new course for Britain.”