OF CABBAGES AND KINGS | As Ex-Tory Suella Comes ‘Home’ To Farage’s Reform, Will Exodus Start? | Farrukh Dhondy

‘‘The base Indian, threw away a pearl

More precious than all his tribe’! --

The bard meant the jewel was a girl

But why does an Indian suffer this jibe?

And yes, in these lines the metaphor is mixed

No tribe in this world ever had a price

But metaphors by appreciative readers’ minds are fixed

As poets cast infinitely numbered dice.”

From Seen Twice on the Double-Dekker, by Bachchoo

Last week’s column had contained the speculation that Suella Braverman of the Conservative Party would be one of the greasy-arsed-slipperies who defect to Reform. It came to pass. The nation watched as Nigel Farage, Fuhrer of Reform, on the stage of some packed Reform Party occasion summoned her, and Cruella appeared to applause, embraced Farage and then she went into a vicious diatribe denouncing the party that she had abandoned as liars and deceivers.

She then went up to the grinning Farage and placed her head on his shoulder in a photogenic embrace, facing the cameras. Nigel looked like an imbecile infant who had been gifted a new, albeit ugly, teddy bear. Yukiko!

Go back to when Cruella was a Tory home secretary. She was responsible for -- perhaps responsibly - - allowing Afghans who had collaborated with the British during the Nato occupation of Afghanistan, before the Taliban had chased them out, to settle in Britain.

It may not have been her compassionate decision, but the force of public opinion that compelled the move. At the time, Cruella was roundly denounced by this same Nigel Farage as someone who was betraying the British population by allocating accommodation to refugees while some Britons were still queuing for it.

That was then. As Cruella crossed the floor, becoming the third Tory MP “traitor”, she said she felt she was “coming home”. To back-tracking pappy?

This is a somewhat strange homecoming as her husband Rael Braverman had just days before quit the Reform Party, “left home”. Will he now follow Cruella and rejoin?

Rael is an ardent anti-antisemite and feels that both Labour and Tory are not sufficiently so. He joined the far-right “national-socialist” Reform, which he is confident is virulently anti-immigrant and, I suppose he knows, if not in an openly stated way, anti-Muslim. While a member, Rael had led other Jewish Reform members to attack Britain’s Jewish Board of Deputies for “being too closely aligned with the Labour Party”. There is no evidence of any formal alignment between the board and Labour, but the board did appreciate Keir Starmer’s public efforts to purge the party of those he regards as antisemites.

The Tory Party complicated matters over Cruella’s defection by a senior member issuing a statement which said, in effect, if not in those words, that the party understood Suella’s defection and sympathised with her as they were aware that she suffered from mental problems. This statement was attacked as it certainly contained the words “mental health”.

The Tory chairman subsequently apologised for the phrase and withdrew the statement, having made the nation and potential voters aware that there was this smoke of crack-pottery emanating around Cruella, so there might be some fire.

Other Tories will certainly follow Suella’s lead. The profiles of the present defectors, three sitting,

and several former MPs who lost their seats or voluntarily left Parliament, such as Nadim Zahawi and Nadine Dorries, suggest to me, gentle reader, that their abandonment of the Tories is a reaction to their failure of ambition within it.

Both Suella and the previous defector, Robert Jenrick, failed in the recent past in their bids for the leadership of the party. Zahawi was accused of illegal behaviour regarding tax and lost his seat, departing under a cloud. Reports say he begged Kemi Badenoch to be made a lord, and when he was rebuffed, went and defected to Reform.

Dorries was, and perhaps still is, an ardent “chamchi” (the Hindi term gets closest) of Boris Johnson and has constantly schemed and plotted for his return to the leadership… yes, Judas to rejoin the Apostles?

Nigel Farage says he accepts these defectors to Reform as his party has, apart from them, no MPs with any experience of government. He himself, though he was a member of the European Parliament and is a British Opposition MP now, has none. Never admitted to the corridors of power.

Will he resign and let one of the experienced defectors take over the leadership? Will the Pope convert to Islam? The question Britain needs to ask is not why Nigel Farage welcomes them, but why they are there.

Cruella says she’s finally “home”. Let’s look at what Jenrick has said about Reform and Farage before he moved into this residence.

In 2025, Jenrick publicly said that Reform was “not a serious party”. He then analytically declared that Reform is moving “far too far to the right”, causing major issues for “national cohesion”.

About Farage, he said he framed policy under the influence of a few pints of beer, and before joining them he said on TV that he wants to “put Reform out of business”. He also said Farage “couldn’t run a five-a-side football team, leave aside a country?”

Were those opinions insincere or is his defection blatant opportunism?

And then Farage has in the past called Jenrick a “fraud”. So, now, good Christians all, they’ve turned the other cheek -- not for another slap, but a reconciling kiss?