For the second time this week, Reform UK have announced a former Conservative cabinet minister has joined them.
The other day they said that former Welsh Secretary David Jones had signed up, back in January.
Two other former Tory MPs defected recently too – Anne Marie Morris and Ross Thomson.
Now it is Sir Jake Berry joining Nigel Farage’s party.
A man knighted by Boris Johnson.
A man whose son counts Johnson as his godfather.
A man who used to be the chairman of the Conservative Party and who was a Tory minister in three different government departments.
And yet a man who now says this: “If you were deliberately trying to wreck the country, you’d be hard pressed to do a better job than the last two decades of Labour and Tory rule.”
Read that sentence again and consider it was written by someone who was not just a Tory MP for 14 years but a senior one, occupying high office.
Extraordinary.
And this is probably not the end of it – both Reform and Conservative folk I speak to hint they expect there to be more to come.
Tories are trying to put the best gloss on it they can, saying Reform might be attracting former MPs – Sir Jake lost his seat at the last election – but they are losing current MPs.
The MP James McMurdock suspended himself from Reform at the weekend after a story in the Sunday Times about loans he took out under a Covid support scheme.
McMurdock has said he was compliant with the rules.
But the trend is clear: Conservatives of varying seniority are being lured across by Nigel Farage and are proud to say so when they make the leap.
Reform are particularly delighted that Sir Jake has not just defected but done so by going “studs in” on his former party, as one source put it.
“For us this is really crucial. If you want to join us you need to be really going for the other side when you do. Drawing a proper line in the sand,” they added.
They regard Sir Jake’s closeness to Boris Johnson as “dagger-in-the-heart stuff” for the Conservatives.
But perhaps the more interesting and consequential pivot in strategy we are currently witnessing is Labour’s approach to Reform.
At the very highest level in government they are reshaping their approach: turning their attention away from their principal opponent of the last century and more, the Conservatives, and tilting instead towards Nigel Farage’s party.
Again, extraordinary.
It tells you a lot about our contemporary politics that a party with Labour’s history, sitting on top of a colossal Commons majority, is now shifting its focus to a party with just a handful of MPs.
Senior ministers take the rise of Reform incredibly seriously and are not dismissing them as a flash in the pan insurgency.
After all, Reform’s lead in many opinion polls has proven to be sustained in recent months and was then garnished with their impressive performance in the English local elections in May and their win, on the same day, in the parliamentary by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in Cheshire.
If Labour folk then were still in need of the jolt of a wake-up call, that night provided it.
In their immediate response to Sir Jake’s defection, Labour are pointing to Reform recruiting Liz Truss’s party chairman and so are inheriting, they claim, her “reckless economics”.
But they know the challenge of taking on and, they hope, defeating Reform, will be work of years of slog and will have to be grounded in proving they can deliver in government – not easy, as their first year in office has so often proven.
Not for the first time in recent months, Reform UK have momentum and are making the political weather.
