Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, The Spectators Daily, or sometimes twice daily, politics

podcast. I'm Oscar Edmondson. I'm joined today by Tim Shipman and James Heel, and what a day for Robert

Jenrick. It started with him being sacked from the Tory party for plotting to defect, continued with the will they won't they of whether he'd move over to reform, and it ended with a press conference where he was announced as Nigel Farage's newest signing.

James, you were there. Does this immediately appear like a happy marriage?

I think a sort of shotgun marriage, maybe perhaps, appropriate Oscar, because Ferris Bueller's day off, the last 24 hours for Robert Jenrick might make for a good reboot.

I mean, it's been quite the day. And I'm writing this book on reforms. I'm looking forward to having to get all the colour.

And that's going to be a chapter in itself.

Yeah, exactly.

So, yeah, the rest conference itself, it sort of started at 430.

And there's one

comical moment where Nigel Farage said, Robert Jemric, and there was about a 40-second pause, in which someone whispered to me, went, family von Trapp, you know, the reference to the bit where, of course, Maria et al-in sound of music run off. So we can categorically rule out that this was in any way planned. I think it would be fair to say there was talks, obviously, as Farage said, but it was certainly

not planned for today. And clearly, you know, Cameron Bay knock played a bad hand as well as she could, which was to take the whip away, get out of front of the narrative. But it means, of course, just in time of the 6 o'clock news, it's going to be the story, lead story, Robert Jermich comes across to reform. That's the top line.

It comes after Kevin Maynock expelled him.

But look, I think Robert Jemreck probably played it very much more supplicant saying, oh, Nigel Fras is basically the one. No one joins reform if they don't want to make him Prime Minister. Basically, the subtext was he's the boss. Yeah. And the boss is what everyone reform calls him. And they have the mission to make him prime minister. And this was very much the boss enjoying the moment.

And so Robert Jermit came across.

He gave a pre-prepared speech. There was a teleprompter there. First half of the text was a fairly kind of standard. 24 Robert Jermit campaign speech talking about the problem with Britain faces. And then the meat of it and the stuff that I think the reform lot will have really wanted to have gotten to say was this quite scathing criticism of ex-conserveded colleagues.

And then the questions were all about what the future is going to be.

But overall, I think reformer put a good spin on the end of a somewhat challenging day.

Yeah. I mean, Tim, if orchestrated properly, this could have had huge maximum impact, but it does feel a

little bit like, even though there's a massive headline that we're leading with, Reform was

slightly on the back foot today.

Yeah, I mean, they're normally, they like to produce the rabbits from hats and shock

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