At Conservative party conference in Birmingham, the hottest attraction is not a policy announcement but a 27-metre woven tapestry depicting recent Tory history in the style of the Bayeux original. Its star villain: Robert Jenrick, the former shadow cabinet member who lost the leadership contest to Kemi Badenoch and then defected to Reform UK. The tapestry shows him tiny, wailing, and eventually banished — standing next to the photocopier where his resignation letter was allegedly found. The Jenrick obsession is not subtle. Shadow cabinet ministers bring him up unprompted. Alex Burghart, the party's deputy leader, responded to a question about taking defectors back with "No, no, no and no" and confirmed he was relieved they were gone. Badenoch herself has publicly thanked Nigel Farage for doing her "spring cleaning." The four Tory MPs who defected have been variously labelled "venal," "mad," and "hopeless" by her team. What is happening here is a classic scapegoat mechanism dressed as comedy. Jenrick — who reportedly had to be prodded by Lord Ashcroft to applaud Badenoch's speech last year — serves as a useful hate object around which a fractured party can coalesce. "Nobody knew how much we hated Robert until he left the party," one senior member says. Another calls his departure "like pulling out a splinter." A third misses him "like I would miss an abscess in my molar." The emotional intensity is disproportionate to Jenrick's actual significance. He is now Reform UK's economy spokesperson, swiping from the sidelines about the Tories copying Reform policies. His social media output — confronting fare-dodgers and shoplifters — draws eye-rolls from former supporters. One member who voted for him in the leadership election says he now "couldn't care less," speculating that Jenrick may regret his move as Reform's momentum fades. Badenoch's camp is playing this smartly. By keeping Jenrick as a punchline rather than a threat, they accomplish two things: they reinforce internal loyalty by defining the cost of disloyalty, and they diminish Reform's credibility by reducing its recruit to a figure of ridicule. The tapestry is propaganda in the medieval sense — a visual narrative that tells members who is inside, who is outside, and what happens to traitors. The risk is that the performative contempt reveals more fragility than strength. Aphra Brandreth, shadow undersecretary for environment, food and rural affairs, insists the party has "moved on" — while standing at an exhibition dedicated to not moving on. The conference's inability to stop talking about a departed backbencher suggests the wound is fresher than the laughter implies. For the Conservatives, the question is whether tribal catharsis translates into electoral viability. Unity around a shared enemy is cheap and temporary. The tapestry gets laughs today, but the underlying problem — that four MPs judged Reform a better bet than Badenoch's Conservatives — remains unresolved by mockery alone.
