Reform’s Tory Lifeboat: Same Old Faces, Brand New Saviours?

Another Friday, another batch of establishment refugees clambering aboard the Reform lifeboat, a spectacle that has now run far too long. Even the rats look faintly embarrassed to be still reading from the same tired script as if they know how obvious it all is. And as the Tories languish in polling irrelevance (20–23%), those very defectors scramble over the side, trading one familiar set of baggage for the promise of insurgent relevance. Naturally. One can only admire the choreography, or at least the sheer nerve.

On 12 January 2026, Nadhim Zahawi, former Chancellor, perpetual self-promoter, and the self-styled ‘boy from Baghdad’, materialised at a central London press conference to announce his switch to Nigel Farage’s insurgent outfit. Flanked by a beaming Farage, he solemnly declared Britain broken and in urgent need of Farage as prime minister.

The moment was intended to project gravitas and momentum. Instead, with almost comic predictability, it descended into the familiar spectacle of establishment figures rebranding their opportunism as public service. When Farage helpfully observed that Zahawi “could have gone abroad and not paid any tax” but had nobly chosen to serve the nation, the irony was so thick one could have spread it on toast.

Here was a man once sacked for tax irregularities now offering himself as the selfless saviour of a country he helped govern into disarray. One can only marvel at the seamless transition.

Zahawi’s record, when the gloss is scraped away, is a veritable study in ethical lapses and convenient reinventions. Sacked as Tory chairman in 2023 after an ethics adviser discovered he had ‘carelessly’ underpaid taxes by nearly £5 million (penalties included), he had breached the ministerial code by concealing an HMRC investigation during cabinet appointments. Earlier parliamentary expenses included taxpayer funds to heat riding stables, horsepower subsidised by the public purse, naturally, because why stop at one form of subsidy when you can heat the stables too?, and his pre-MP business venture, Allen Hinckley Ltd, collapsed in 1998 amid millions in debts and the loss of around 100 jobs.

The Kurdistan oil connections add a further layer of almost-too-perfect wry complexity. After entering Parliament in 2010, Zahawi assumed vice-chair (later co-chair) of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Kurdistan, which received secretarial support from Gulf Keystone Petroleum, operator of the Shaikan field. Five funded trips to the region followed between 2011 and 2015, courtesy of the Kurdistan Regional Government.

From 2015 to 2018 he served as Gulf Keystone’s part-time chief strategy officer, earning at least £1.3 million, including monthly fees up to £29,643 for limited hours and a £285,000 settlement upon entering government.It’s no surprise that during this period the company benefited from improved payment terms from the KRG amid low oil prices and regional strains.

Zahawi’s consultancy firm, meanwhile, generated over £1 million advising oil interests in the region, he also arranged a 2015 trade visit for Boris Johnson and facilitated a parliamentary internship for Mazen Barzani, a relative of prominent KRG figures, precisely as Gulf Keystone sought expanded drilling rights.

Rooted in heritage though they may be, these ties remain undeniably lucrative and they sit, shall we say, rather uneasily with Reform’s carefully cultivated image of untainted economic pragmatism. One might almost call it ironic, if one hadn’t seen it all before.

Zahawi’s policy flexibility is equally telling. As a Conservative minister he consistently endorsed Net Zero. In 2019 he described the 2050 target as “the law of the land” and urged clean growth, in 2021, as Education Secretary, he advocated embedding climate education at the heart of the curriculum and during his 2022 leadership bid he backed the transition while emphasising affordability caveats to shield families from undue costs.Reform UK, by contrast, vows to abandon Net Zero as economically ruinous.

Zahawi’s defection has arrived without any retraction or qualification of those earlier positions, a pivot that rather undermines claims of ideological consistency, or indeed consistency of any kind. One might almost call it a pattern.

However, it is the peerage episode that provides the sharpest illustration of motive. Tory sources report that Zahawi made repeated approaches, described as “begging”, for elevation to the House of Lords in late 2025, only to be rebuffed due to his “dodgy tax affairs”. Zahawi denies the characterisation, insisting he received assurances that Badenoch’s team would “look at elevating” him in 2026.

Whatever the precise exchanges may have been, the sequence, peerage pursuit followed, with almost comic timing, by defection, invites scrutiny of whether this represents principled renewal or merely personal reinvention.

A comparable pattern emerges with Nadine Dorries, who defected in September 2025 while proclaiming the Tories dead. She arrives with her own anthology of controversies, prolonged parliamentary silence before resigning her seat in 2023 to pursue media and literary interests, a peerage denial that sparked ‘forceful’ official contacts and a Speaker referral, impartiality scrutiny as Culture Secretary alongside nepotism allegations (her daughters reportedly earning up to £80,000 in taxpayer-funded roles), the 2012 I’m a Celebrity suspension, her staunch Partygate defence of Johnson and her viral TikTok rap explaining the Online Safety Bill, a 41-second performance ending in a mic drop that became instant meme material.

Her earlier support for that bill now clashes, rather predictably, with Reform’s commitment to repeal it, because nothing says ‘anti-establishment’ like yesterday’s establishment cheerleader.

Not to be outdone in the parade of recycled Tory talent, Robert Jenrick has lately been the subject of renewed scrutiny amid whispers of his own potential realignment (now confirmed true). The former Housing Secretary, who was sacked (or resigned) from the shadow cabinet on 15th January 2026 over an alleged plot to defect to Reform UK, has long positioned himself as a hard-right standard-bearer on immigration. Yet his record invites the same sceptical gaze.

In 2023, while Housing Secretary, he was found to have breached the ministerial code by approving a £1.5 billion development linked to a major Tory donor, Richard Desmond. The decision was overturned by the High Court, prompting an ethics inquiry that concluded he had acted improperly. Add to this his abrupt policy shifts, from defending net-zero commitments in 2022 to later courting Reform-friendly rhetoric, and the pattern becomes all too familiar. A man who once aspired to Tory leadership now apparently weighing his options as the party sinks. How very surprising.

These crossings, Zahawi being the twentieth former Tory MP to defect, lend Reform a degree of Westminster polish, yet they also help explain the party’s polling dominance. More in Common’s January 2026 MRP projects Reform securing 381 seats and a majority of 112 if an election were held today, on roughly 31 per cent of the vote, one of the most disproportionate outcomes in modern British history.

The Conservatives currently languish at 20–23 per cent, with Labour at 19 per cent. Membership exceeds 270,000 paid-up members according to Reform’s live counter, overtaking Labour’s audited figures and reflecting genuine grassroots energy. By-elections in 2025 delivered victories and 68 new councillors, while Reform draws about 33 per cent of former Tory voters, many of whom remain wary, quite understandably given the baggage, of these high-profile imports.

The truth is the Reform coalition is an odd but revealing mix. Northern working-class seats fed up with Labour’s metropolitan obsessions, rural traditionalists irritated by Tory agricultural policy, and younger ideologues who want authenticity rather than another polished CV.

That being said, Reform now leads on economic trust, which rather neatly exposes Labour’s quiet continuities with the Tories and leaves the Conservatives looking increasingly irrelevant. Online chatter treats those 150 consecutive poll leads as nothing less than a sustained middle finger to elite continuity.

Critics, of course, keep shouting “populism!” while fixating on immigration rhetoric and climate scepticism. Recent minor dips in the polls have been tied, surprise, surprise, to internal grumbling about Zahawi’s “naked opportunism”. Yet the underlying dynamic holds, Reform rises precisely by repudiating Tory ghosts. Should it become a retirement home for thwarted ministerial ambitions, it risks alienating the very base that carried it this far, the one that believed it was finally free of Westminster’s recycled disappointments.

And then there is Zahawi’s brief advisory stint on the Henry Jackson Society’s Political Council (circa 2014–2015, alongside various other MPs in what is routinely described as a neoconservative outfit with a notably hawkish foreign-policy outlook), one more little reminder of the establishment networks many Reform voters thought they were escaping. Though, naturally, it was only peripheral and advisory, not executive of course.

A Reform breakthrough could, rather deliciously, force the long-overdue overhaul of first-past-the-post, the very system that somehow turned four million votes into a grand total of five seats back in 2024. The Conservatives, meanwhile, stare into the abyss unless they somehow reinvent themselves, while challengers keep cheerfully nibbling away at the edges.

Reform’s commanding position is, at best, a measure of how desperately the public wants politics that isn’t just the same old faces repackaged. Zahawi, Dorries and now Jenrick embody precisely the hypocrisy voters say they despise, yet their arrival quietly tests whether Reform can stay the authentic insurgent outfit it keeps insisting it is, or whether it ends up, almost comically, as yet another vehicle for elite reinvention.

The electorate, ever watchful, will no doubt deliver its verdict, with the same weary sigh we’ve all come to expect when another batch of establishment refugees turns up to heroically rescue us from…yes, themselves.

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