The Conservative Party is so toxic it is like “the plague” it was claimed after a second Tory defected to Reform in 24 hours. Belinda de Lucy, a former Brexit Party MEP, said Nigel Farage is welcoming “original conservatives” but will reject anyone who is out for themselves. The Reform member insisted the leader had “set the bar high” as she praised Danny Kruger as an “intellectual heavyweight” for making the leap along with former minister Maria Caulfield.
Speaking on the Daily Expresso, our weekday news show on YouTube, she said: “The Conservative Party is so broken and so toxic that it’s like being around the plague, or being around something that if you touch, you know you’re just going to get ill.
“That’s how bad it is. And I was a Tory member for 20 years, and I cut up my membership card card as soon as they started rebelling against Brexit.
“But they’re not the same party. It’s full of yellow Tories, full of the liberals.
“It was interesting that Miriam Cates, who’s a former Tory MP, was saying how hard it was in the Tory party to get them to suspend even tiny elements of the ECHR to help deport people.
“The Tory party were not having it, because it is more of a Lib Dem party than anything else. “So the original conservatives with a small c – family, country and community – should be welcome in Reform. Not so much the yellow belly ones.”
De Lucy said she would welcome former home secretary Suella Braverman into Reform but said shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick should not be allowed in as he is “still tying his chain to the sinking ship and hasn’t moved earlier”.
She added: “The Tory ship is sinking. There’s only going to be a couple of life boats out.”
The comments came as Kemi Badenoch admitted her party is going through a “rough and bumpy time” following the latest defections.
The Conservative leader said “there will be some people who won’t be patient” with her party’s pace of change, and suggested there could be more defections if Mr Farage’s Reform maintains its polling lead.
She said: “It’s quite clear that we lost a historic defeat last year. It’s going to take time for us to win back the public trust.
“There will be some people who won’t be patient and just want to jump to the party that’s doing well in the polls.
“We saw that happen last year with Tory MPs jumping to the Labour Party because they were doing well in the polls.
“I’m not going to be distracted by any of that. I’ve got to focus on what is happening in people’s lives right now. And the biggest issue is the economy.”
Ms Badenoch also told GB News that “every leader regrets losing people to another party”.
She added that others could leave “because they don’t like the new policies”, such as her emphasis on “no more lavish spending” and cutting welfare, and agreed that her party faced a difficult period.
She said: “When a party has just had a historic defeat, we will have a very tough and bumpy time before we come back up again.”
