British politics rewards the dramatic gesture and overlooks the dreary virtue. A defection gets you a press conference and the flattering framing of a “man of principle”. Turning up to a residents’ meeting to deal with speeding, anti-social behaviour, or a council system that is failing people does not. That is why jumping ship is sold as courage, while staying put to fix what went wrong is dismissed as tribalism.

The latest rush of Conservatives to Reform is being marketed as a political awakening. I do not buy it.

Conservatives should stop dodging the uncomfortable admission. We helped to break parts of Britain. Not in the cartoonish way our opponents suggest, but through drift, division and a loss of intellectual discipline. We tolerated too many people who liked the label but had no instinct for its substance, and we treated competence as optional precisely when it should have been our calling card.

That is why the moral posturing of defectors grates. If you were around for the mistakes, you do not get to pose as a saviour because you walked out of the room. Leaving is not repentance. It is evasion.

I understand the impulse, though. I would be lying if I said I had never thought about it myself. Many of us have. Those of us who do the work at ground level have watched the party, at times, be steered by Conservatives in name only (CINOs) — people who wore the badge but never lived the discipline behind it.

But there is a difference between being angry and being useful.

I say that not as an armchair commentator, but as someone who has to look people in the eye every week as both a County Councillor and a District Councillor. “Broken Britain” is not an abstract slogan when you are handling casework and scrutiny and then facing residents again the next day.

You see it most sharply in planning. I sit with residents who are not “anti-housebuilding”, but who are furious that decisions are waved through as if infrastructure is an optional extra. Roads are already at capacity, school places tight, GP access strained, drainage marginal — yet people are told mitigation will come “later”. They know when the sums do not add up, and they know who carries the risk when “later” never comes.

That is where “principle” is tested. Not in the green room before a studio interview, but in draughty halls listening to people who have every right to be fed up.

Reform offers catharsis. It validates anger and aims it at the nearest target. But anger is not an operating model for government.

This is where Robert Jenrick matters, because defections are not only about ideology; they are also about integrity. Politics runs on trust long before it runs on votes. If you ask colleagues, advisers, activists and volunteers to slog their guts out for you — to defend you on the doorstep and put their names to your campaign — you owe them honesty about your intentions. When people discover that the person they respected was not straight with them, the impact is profound. It hardens cynicism and breaks the loyalty circle that keeps politics honest and effective.

Reform is, in practice, a one-man band. Nigel Farage is the brand and the gravitational pull. Jenrick plainly thinks he can step into that space as the man with the common touch, but with more intellectual grunt and administrative credibility than Farage. But it is difficult to believe he has joined to play second fiddle indefinitely — and if that has been the plan, then those who backed him inside the Conservative Party have every right to feel used.

That tells you something about Reform itself. It behaves less like a serious governing party and more like a personality-driven protest vehicle, built around grievance and escalation. Enemies are easy. Solutions come with arithmetic and trade-offs.

So what should Conservatives do? We rebuild, and we do it properly. The hard thing to do is fight from within. It means admitting failure without surrendering the field to opportunists. It means restoring conservatism as a serious governing tradition again, not a costume you wear at election time.

Under Kemi Badenoch, the party has a route back, but only if we choose discipline over drama. Higher standards, clearer principles, and the courage to tell the truth about money and the limits of the state. Fiscal restraint as a moral duty. Respect for work, enterprise and family. A clear-eyed commitment to law and order. Competence, delivery, follow-through.

This is where Thatcher matters, and it is where the defectors’ claim to her legacy becomes laughable. Thatcherism was not noise. It was a serious moral and economic argument, backed by the discipline to take hard decisions and live with the consequences.

Reform has not inherited that legacy. It has packaged anger, and it will not be able to govern on it. That is on us as well, because anger grows when institutions fail and when Conservatives let standards slip. But the answer is not to abandon the project of serious government and replace it with a protest movement that will turn inward the moment ambition collides with ambition.

So no, I will not applaud the jumpers. If they truly believed what they now claim to believe, they had every opportunity to fight for it from within. Walking away now does not cleanse their record. It confirms that when things got hard, they chose the shortcut.

If you want the easy path, take it. If you want the right one, stay. Own what went wrong. Strip out the CINOs. Return to first principles. Rebuild a party that deserves to govern, not because it shouts loudest, but because it can do the job.

Britain does not need another cult of personality. It needs a serious Conservative recovery, grounded in responsibility.