His doubts about those in other parties which claim to share this political space, such as the Conservatives, have been made clear and he even directly called Mr Jenrick “a fraud” in last year over the former Tory’s time in the Home Office and the procurement of hotel spaces for migrants. Mr Jenrick was immigration minister from October 2022 to December 2023 during the Conservative party struggles to pass the Rwanda legislation which would have seen asylum seekers and Channel migrants processed in the central African state rather than in the UK.

But speaking to the Daily Expresso podcast, former Daily Express Political Editor Sam Lister said Mr Farage may have got his initial assessment of Mr Jenrick wrong. She said the ex-Tory MP may have started off on the more liberal David Cameron side of the Tory party, but he was now a very different person.

She told Associate Editor James Walker: “I’ve known Robert Jenrick for quite some time, obviously my time over in Westminster, and I’ve talked to him at length, because he definitely started off on the kind of Cameron side of the party, but you’ve got to remember he was only in his early 30s when he arrived in Parliament.

James said: “You kind of know yourself from that point?

But Sam laughed: “Do you? You get a bit more right wing as you get older I find”, before joking with James about his own age which he revealed as “just turned 30”, before adding: “Some would say I look 50.”

Sam continued: “He (Jenrick) kind of went in as a Cameron type… I had a long chat with him about this quite a while ago, about his time in the Home Office, and he always said that it radicalised him…he has spoken about this publicly… because he went into the Home Office as fairly moderate kind of chap… he goes into the Home Office and went ‘what the hell, this is a basket case’.”

Discussing Jenrick’s time in the Home Office, Sam pointed out the then young MP could not believe how the department was run, before he resigned “on principle”.

Jenrick left his position as immigration minister in December 2023, saying the then Conservative Government’s Rwanda legislation did “not go far enough”.

Sam added: “You have to remember he represents Newark, in the Midlands… and he talks to normal people every day, he’s talking to ordinary people, he’s not just stuck in that kind of mindset of the Cotswolds.”

She added that she had “looked him in the eye” and thought he was “genuine” about his feelings about the Home Office.

Mr Jenrick has insisted his defection to Reform UK was “uniting the right”, as he said he had put the country before his allegiance to the Conservative Party.

In an interview with the BBC, he denied that personal ambition had played a role in his defection to Reform after he was sacked from the shadow cabinet. Arguing that nobody could “seriously make that argument”, he said he hoped Thursday would be remembered as “a time when the right united, when people put aside party loyalties and came together to fix our country”.

But his former leader, Kemi Badenoch, said she was happy to see him go, describing him as “not a team player” and “Nigel Farage‘s problem”. Mr Jenrick’s sudden defection came hours after Mrs Badenoch dismissed him as shadow justice secretary and suspended him from the Conservative Party, accusing him of plotting to jump ship to Reform.

Although both he and Mr Farage have said his defection had not been planned for Thursday, Mr Jenrick told the BBC he had “resolved” to go during the Christmas break.

But the “final straw” had come during a shadow cabinet away day last week, in which he had argued with fellow frontbenchers about whether Britain was “broken”.