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Former Conservative party chair Jake Berry has defected to Reform UK, becoming the latest Tory to switch to Nigel Farage’s insurgent rightwing populist party.
Berry, who is no longer an MP, wrote in The Sun that he believed “change comes with challenging the old order. In shaking up the system when it isn’t working”.
Berry briefly served as chair of the Conservative party under Liz Truss. He lost his seat as an MP for the Lancashire constituency of Rossendale and Darwen, which he had held since 2010, at the 2024 general election.
He becomes the latest Tory to switch to Reform as Farage’s party rides high in the polls, with a clear lead over Labour and the Conservatives despite only currently having four MPs.
Berry’s defection on Wednesday brings the number of former Conservative MPs to have switched to Reform in the past fortnight to four. The others are former Welsh Secretary David Jones, Anne Marie Morris and Ross Thomson.
Berry, who was once a close ally of former prime minister Boris Johnson, was scathing about his former party.
“Britain is broken. It didn’t start with Labour,” he said in The Sun article. The Conservative governments I was part of share the blame.
“We now have a tax system that punishes hard work and ambition . . . At the same time, our benefits system is pulling in the world’s poor with no plan for integration and no control over who comes in.”
Reform dropped to four MPs in the past week from five after party whip James McMurdock suspended himself following allegations that he received £70,000 of government loans during the coronavirus pandemic.
He has said he is co-operating fully with the investigation but reports suggest he is unlikely to return to the party.
On Wednesday Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer told MPs the Labour government would continue to pursue allegedly fraudulent Covid loans.
“We will continue to go after the fraudsters, grifters and the con artists,” Starmer said at Prime Minister’s Questions. “No matter who they are or where we find them.”
