The Stable Door

During the pandemic, Nadhim Zahawi was the Vaccines Minister. Still, his experience at the Presidents Club will enable to explain Bonnie Blue to Ann Widdecombe.

From the Right by anyone’s standards, Robert Hutton writes:

“Probably the most popular politician” — the newest recruit to Nigel Farage’s Reform Party was describing themselves. With that introduction, there could be no doubt. It was, of course… Well, hang on a moment. Why don’t you have a guess? Someone who was once probably Britain’s most popular politician. No peeking.

Farage had opened the morning’s event with a complaint that sketchwriters keep describing Reform as a one-man band. This was quite unfair. We could see the other members of the band in the front row, laughing loyally at the Dear Leader’s jokes. There were Danny Kruger, David Bull, Richard Tice, Lee Anderson and the Cambridge theologian James Orr. You could get a pub quiz team out of that lot. Or a really terrible podcast. 

So they exist, although they’re rarely allowed to open their mouths. Tice’s last appearance was to apologise for something he’d said in a previous one. Kruger has announced that Reform will be copying Donald Trump’s second term, rather than his first, a position that looks madder with every piece of news coming out of the US.

But who would be next to join the row of nodding dogs that will turn Britain around? Only someone who was once probably the most popular politician in the country! Last chance to have a guess! Farage was cueing up the video reveal. That’s right, it was… Nadhim Zahawi!

I’m afraid some of us laughed. Former Tory chairman Nadhim Zahawi, a man who as Chancellor of the Exchequer was under investigation by his own department over his tax affairs, and who threatened legal action against reporters who asked questions about this! Who agreed, while in that job, to pay the revenue a £1 million penalty, and failed to mention this to any of the three prime ministers he worked for! Who accepted a job from Boris Johnson and then denounced him two days later! Or, according to taste, “probably the most popular politician” in the country.

In he marched, to give a speech about the appalling mess the country is in. “Nothing works today!” declared the man who was a Conservative MP for the 14 years the party was in government. Children should “be taught facts, not harmful fictions at school,” declared the Education Secretary (2021-22). The country was “crushed into the dirt by ever-growing taxes”, said a man who could have helped with that by paying what he owed when he owed it.

“I have been reflecting on the successes and failures of my own party’s time in government,” Zahawi went on. “My analysis is that a huge culprit is…” You? Your colleagues? Of course not.

What a gift it would be, as Robert Burns observed, to see ourselves as others see us. I had completely forgotten that in 2022 Zahawi actually stood for the party leadership. He thought he should have been prime minister! He wakes each morning and sees, in the bathroom mirror, a brilliant businessman, a noble politician, a wise statesman. A man cruelly denied the chance to achieve true greatness because his colleagues couldn’t recognise quality. Because the officious taxman with his silly rules insisted on being paid a few million more. Because pigmy journalists refused to listen to his lawyers when he said his tax affairs weren’t being investigated. Is there something else he should have had? Some other appointment that a former chancellor might expect? Let’s come back to that.

There were a lot of questions about the awful things Zahawi had said about Farage in the past, but the two men laughed it off. “These accusations of racism, of -isms of all kinds, get thrown around every single day,” Farage said. “But they get thrown around so much that, frankly, they almost become meaningless.” Likewise the Reform leader was asked about a past comment that Zahawi was simply interested in “climbing the greasy pole”. This, of course, explained why he was joining Reform.

It’s only a few months since the Reform conference was told that the Covid jab had given the Royal family cancer. Now Zahawi, minister for the vaccine roll-out, was joining the party. Had he been assured that the party had abandoned its vaccine conspiracy theories? That was a “stupid” question, Zahawi said angrily, without quite explaining why.

Zahawi brings several things to Farage: a sense of momentum, that Reform is the party on the move; reassurance, that a second-generation immigrant who once called the party dangerous no longer thinks so; and of course experience. “I’ve seen at close hand some of the mistakes prime ministers have made,” Zahawi explained. More than that, he’s been one of them.

They were asked again about Elon Musk’s X, with its new function of stripping the clothes off people in any photograph you give it. “You can do this on PowerPoint!” Zahawi volunteered, offering another example of the skills he brings to Reform. We can expect the party’s presentations to get significantly spicier in the months to come.

But what might Reform have to offer Zahawi? Here we got to it. What do other former Chancellors of the Exchequer have that he doesn’t? We asked if a peerage might be coming. Both men looked shifty. “No promises have been made,” Zahawi said. “No promises have been sought.” The Tories later claimed he’d asked them for a seat in the Lords and they’d refused. But that can’t be true. Nadhim Zahawi, once probably the most popular politician in Britain, had denied it, and that’s a denial, as the taxman can tell you, that you can take to the bank.

From the Left by anyone’s standards, Paul Knaggs writes:

Is there anything quite so wretched as an arsonist complaining about the smell of smoke?

Nadhim Zahawi, the man who sat at the very heart of the Tory government for years, has defected to Reform UK. He claims the country has reached a “dark and dangerous” moment. He calls for a “glorious revolution” to overthrow the very bureaucracy he once commanded.

It is a spectacle that demands not just our attention, but our cold, unblinking scrutiny.

Here we have a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, a man who held the purse strings of the nation, now posing as an insurgent outsider. It is a political transformation so cynical, so devoid of self-awareness, that it clarifies the entire nature of our current democratic malaise.

The Illusion of Rebellion

I am reminded of a conversation I had years ago in a working men’s club in the North East, long before the ‘Red Wall’ fell. An old union rep told me that the most dangerous man in the room isn’t the boss who cuts your wages. It is the foreman who cuts your wages, shakes your hand, and then blames the company ledger he just signed.

Zahawi is that foreman.

He speaks of an “over-powerful” civil service. He decries the “quangos” established under Blair and continued under the Tories.

Let us be rigorously precise about what this means.

Zahawi served as a minister from 2018 to 2023. He was Education Secretary. He was Chairman of the Conservative Party. He was Chancellor. If the civil service was “over-powerful,” it was because ministers like him were too weak, too distracted, or too incompetent to lead.

Zahawi even acknowledged his own role in what he now calls “constitutional vandalism”. That is refreshingly honest, though it raises an awkward question: if you helped smash the house, why should anyone trust you to rebuild it?

To blame the machinery of state for the failures of its operators is the last refuge of the political scoundrel.

A History Lesson for the ‘Revolutionary’

Zahawi’s choice of historical metaphor is revealing. He calls for a “glorious revolution”.

We assume he refers to the events of 1688. In the popular imagination, this was a triumph of liberty. In historical reality, it was a coup by the landed aristocracy and the merchant class to secure their property rights against the Crown. It was a transfer of power from one elite to another, cementing the rule of the oligarchy for centuries.

It did nothing for the common man. It was a revolution for the rich, by the rich.

How fitting, then, that Zahawi should invoke it.

This is a man whose defining moment in office was not a policy triumph, but a scandal involving his own personal wealth.

Let us recall the facts. Zahawi was sacked by Rishi Sunak after an independent ethics adviser found he had breached the Ministerial Code. He failed to disclose that his tax affairs were under investigation by HMRC. He eventually paid a penalty to settle the dispute, reportedly in the region of £5 million.

For a man who settled a multimillion-pound tax bill while serving as the custodian of the nation’s finances to now lecture the public on “virtue-signalling” is a grotesquerie.

The Reform Lifeboat

Why does this matter?

It matters because it exposes the fraud at the heart of Reform UK. Nigel Farage insists his party is not “Conservative 2.0”. Yet he welcomes Zahawi, a man who embodies the very establishment rot Farage claims to despise.

If you are truly anti-establishment, you do not roll out the red carpet for the former Chairman of the Conservative Party.

This is not a rebellion. It is a lifeboat.

As the Conservative Party disintegrates, its primary architects are seeking sanctuary. They are shedding their blue rosettes, pinning on turquoise ones, and hoping the public suffers from collective amnesia.

They rely on the premise that if they shout loudly enough about “woke nonsense” and “bureaucracy,” we will forget who built the bureaucracy. We will forget who presided over the economic decline. We will forget the austerity, the decay of public services, and the looting of the public purse during the pandemic.

The False Choice

There will be those who argue that Zahawi’s defection is genuine. They will say he has seen the error of his ways, that he is a “convert” to the cause of national sovereignty.

This is a comforting fiction…

The reality is colder. These men are not guided by ideology, but by survival. They sense the shifting wind. They see that the Conservative brand is toxic, perhaps terminally so. They move to Reform not to change the system, but to ensure they remain atop it.

It is the politics of the chameleon.

When Zahawi speaks of “taking back control,” he does not mean handing power to the people. He means reasserting the control of his class – the asset-rich, the tax-efficient, the politically mobile – under a new banner.

The defecting Tory grandee is not a sign of change. It is proof that the British political class views parties not as vehicles for principles, but as shells for personal ambition.

Real reform does not come from the men who broke the country. It does not come from tax-avoiding Chancellors seeking a new audience. It comes from a rejection of the entire economic orthodoxy that men like Zahawi and Farage share.

They may change their ties. They may change their parties. But they cannot change what they are.

“They are the establishment. And they are laughing at us.”

Zahawi calls for a revolution; he is merely rearranging the heaters along the stalls of his stables.

And in the almost parodically centrist space that is the Deputy Editor of Conservative Home in The Guardian, Henry Hill writes:

Defections always pose a messaging dilemma for political parties. Heap too much ordure on the turncoat, and you invite the question of why you were happy to share a tent with them in the first place; praise them too highly, and you exacerbate whatever damage the defection is doing to you.

In the Conservatives’ case, this problem is compounded for journalists by the hyperinflation in key posts. A “former chancellor of the exchequer” sounds like a big deal, and historically it would have been. But in the five years of the last parliament there were no fewer than five chancellors (Margaret Thatcher, across her entire 11-year premiership, had three).

So how do we assess this one? Nadhim Zahawi held several cabinet-level positions under the previous government, but none of them for very long. The most sustained stint was education secretary (September 2021 to July 2022), and the most memorable event of that year was the dramatic scrapping of a schools bill that, it turned out, to the apparent surprise of ministers, would have rolled back much of the Tories’ education reform agenda.

Perhaps that experience explains Zahawi’s emphasis, at Reform UK’s press conference today, on the need “to take back control from the rich powers of the unelected bureaucracy”. But it doesn’t obviously commend him as the man to do so.

At a basic level, all but the most unusual defection is bad for the party being left. Beyond the obvious optical problems it creates, even the departure of the most shameless opportunist says something about the direction in which they think opportunity lies.

Moreover, the effect of these things compounds over time: the more people leave, the greater the overall impression of people leaving and the more people who start to think about leaving. So we should be clear that, whatever caveats may apply, this and most other defections from the Tory party are bad for the Tory party. 

How bad is a different, more difficult and much more interesting question. One of the problems with covering defections as a journalist is that there is often either great temptation or great pressure (sometimes both) to slot a defection neatly into a grand narrative: “What does this mean for the Tories/Labour?”

But at the personal level – and there are few things more personal than changing teams – politics is rarely a question purely, or even mainly, decided by big-picture ideological criteria. All manner of other factors – an individual’s ambitions but also their actual personal relationships on either side of whatever line they are crossing – make a big difference.

Only Zahawi truly knows the balance of these factors behind this decision (Tory sources claim it was his repeated failure to secure a peerage from Kemi Badenoch’s office, which Zahawi denies). But what we outside observers can note is that nothing in his defection speech highlighted any great ideological schism; you will not find Badenoch (or Robert Jenrick, for that matter) offering paeans to the administrative state. His choice of Reform UK is framed therefore as a question of who is best placed to deliver on this (as yet largely unwritten) agenda.

On this, Zahawi was not persuasive. That the Conservatives’ record on managing the state was dire, especially between 2019 and 2024, is difficult to dispute. But that does not mean that Farage, whose various parties have contrived to wreak a great deal of change without ever having to actually run anything, is going to do any better. Too many Reform enthusiasts talk as if proving the case against the Conservatives necessarily proves a case for their own party, when it is sadly but obviously true that both are quite capable of disappointing us at the same time.

This defection also highlights a difficulty for Reform. A party whose stated objective is to bury the Tories needs to appeal to voters who turfed the Tories out in 2024, and 89 of the 98 seats in which it finished second at the last election are held by Labour. It needs to be quite careful about the extent to which it allows itself to be populated by former Tories.

Because Zahawi’s argument today – that the Conservatives can’t be trusted to fix the state because they didn’t manage it last time – doesn’t stop applying to him just because he’s swapped his rosette. A change of heart by a politician can be extremely powerful if accompanied by a sincere mea culpa (as was Keith Joseph’s during the Tories’ last revolution). But there was no sign of any of that on stage today.