Dear John,
Today, Nadhim Zahawi became the third former Conservative Minister to defect to Reform UK. Fleeing his sinking ship along with Danny Kruger and Nadine Dorries, he’s found safe harbour in Farage’s populist party. Ironically, Reform is overseeing the UK’s most generous asylum scheme for disgraced Tory ministers.
The first thing that comes to mind is the sheer opportunism of it. Zahawi, who was sacked from his ministerial post after he failed to disclose an HMRC investigation into his tax affairs in 2023, reportedly spent the first days of 2026 begging for a Conservative peerage. Amazingly, being denied that peerage (likely over the circumstances of his inelegant exit) seems to have completely changed his political beliefs.
Zahawi once claimed that he’d be “frightened” to live in a country run by Farage. He today deleted an old tweet from 2015 calling Farage’s rhetoric “offensive & racist.” He’s argued a number of times for the benefits of immigration. Those problems have now seemingly evaporated for Zahawi, who today dismissed any and all concerns about racism, and claimed that Farage as Prime Minister would fix our “sick” country.
And the hypocritical opportunism goes the other way, too. Farage, upon Zahawi’s sacking in 2023, said that “it’s not a good look.” “The Tories are not fit to govern,” he claimed, and “this episode proves that.” But he now says that Zahawi will bring in the “frontline experience” his party lacks, that Zahawi has “been on the inside and knows how Government works.” Which one is it?
Reform has also positioned itself in opposition to the vastly unpopular carousel of Conservative Governments. Farage himself rails against the ‘uniparty’ of Labour and the Conservatives, claiming to oppose their economic mismanagement and their immigration policies. But they do seem quite keen to take in that era’s power players.
While the hypocrisy and crude political manoeuvring of Zahawi, Kruger, Dorries and Farage is something to behold, it risks obscuring the more serious point.
The scarier realisation is that the so-called cordon sanitaire – the long-standing norm that centre-right parties keep a clear distance from far-right extremism – is breaking down before our eyes. Zahawi’s move isn’t just about rehabilitating his own career; it helps normalise Nigel Farage as a credible national leader.
When former Chancellors and Cabinet ministers are willing to launder ideas they once called racist and frightening, the boundary between the mainstream right and the far-right is basically non-existent.
So yes, Zahawi is another former Tory cynically sailing today’s noxious political currents, willing to dispose of his former values for an ounce of relevance and attention. You’d think he might wonder who it was that made Britain “sick”, as he claims it is today, or who ushered in this “dark and dangerous chapter” for which he claims Farage is the only solution?
But the bigger story here is that this is another sign of Farage becoming mainstream. That it is now treated as normal to suggest people of different skin colours can’t live together, that immigration is the singular explanation for every national failure, or that complex economic and social problems can be reduced to culture-war slogans. Each high-profile defection helps legitimise those ideas – not because they are right, but because they are being voiced by people who once sat at the heart of government.
That’s the real danger. Not that Zahawi has changed parties, but that the line which once kept the far right at the margins is fading fast – and too many on the mainstream right seem willing to erase it altogether.
