Robert Jenrick, who defected from the Conservative Party to Reform UK earlier this year, posted on X condemning the Belfast knife attack as “truly barbaric” and calling for police to set out the facts. Within hours, a community note added by X users pointed out that Jenrick was the Immigration Minister in the last Conservative government when the man charged with attempted murder – a 30-year-old Sudanese man – was granted a five-year visa to remain in the UK in 2023. Suella Braverman, also now in Reform, was the Home Secretary in overall charge of immigration policy at the time.
The suspect is due to appear in court. As we reported in our Belfast stabbing piece, the victim remains in a serious condition in hospital. Police have declared a critical incident and held emergency meetings about potential far-right unrest.
The post – and the note
Jenrick’s post on X read: “We’ve woken up to truly barbaric footage on a street in Belfast. Of a kind you’d think you’d never see in this country. For years now I’ve urged the police to spell out the basic, sober facts, as they have them, when there are horrors like this.”
The community note applied by X users was direct: Jenrick was immigration minister in the last Tory government when the man charged was given leave to remain in the UK.
It is worth pausing on the timeline. The man was granted a five-year visa to remain in the UK in 2023. Robert Jenrick served as Immigration Minister from September 2022 to December 2023, when he resigned over what he described as the Rwanda policy not going far enough. Suella Braverman was Home Secretary from October 2022 to November 2023. Both now sit in Reform UK, the party whose home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf described the incident as “a direct result of treacherous Tory and Labour immigration policy.”
Both are part of that Tory immigration policy.
Reform’s internal awkwardness
Sky News correspondent Alexandra Rogers was among those to identify the specific problem this creates for Reform. “I think there will be a little bit of disquiet in that party taking on some of these Tories and having to defend this record, undermining what Reform is trying to do now. It really highlights that reputational risk that Nigel Farage absorbed when he took on former Conservatives.”
As we reported in our net migration piece, net migration reached a record 944,000 under the Conservative government – the government in which Jenrick served as Immigration Minister. When the 48% fall under Labour was reported, Jenrick’s response was to complain that too many British people were leaving the country.
Reform’s founding political proposition is that the Conservative Party failed on immigration and that Reform will do better. The proposition requires its former Conservative MPs – of whom Jenrick is the most prominent – to embody that critique rather than exemplify the failure. A community note reminding the public that Jenrick’s ministerial tenure covered the period when the Belfast suspect was granted leave to remain is precisely the kind of thing that makes that proposition harder to sustain.
Braverman’s response
Braverman’s defence of her record, offered on GB News, rejected the framing rather than the facts. “As Home Secretary I repeatedly argued to the prime minister and the cabinet that we needed to leave the European Convention on Human Rights to stop the invasion. For this, I was attacked, blocked and undermined by my own Conservative colleagues who have consistently refused to apologise for the failures of the last government.”
She went further: “The failure to stop the boats and leave the ECHR remains the greatest betrayal by the last Conservative government and it is why over 90% of asylum claims are approved. It is the main reason I left that dysfunctional and treacherous party and why the Conservative Party can never be trusted again.”
Braverman’s argument – that she wanted to do more and was prevented – has a certain internal logic. But it also requires accepting that the Conservative government she served in for years was responsible for the failures she now campaigns against. Zia Yusuf’s description of “treacherous Tory and Labour immigration policy” implicitly encompasses the government Braverman and Jenrick served. Braverman appears to agree with that assessment. Jenrick’s community note makes the agreement uncomfortable.
As we reported in our Stefanovic Reform policies piece, Stefanovic documented that Reform’s Great Repeal Act would strip workers’ rights, repeal the Equality Act and leave the ECHR – the same ECHR departure Braverman claims would have solved the immigration problem. What she cannot claim is that she was not in a position of power when the current situation developed.
The pattern
The Belfast attack is producing the same political dynamic we documented in our coverage of the Henry Nowak case. As we reported in our Farage Nowak piece, Reform’s pattern is to use a specific and horrific case to advance a pre-existing political argument about immigration, regardless of whether the specific case supports the argument or who was responsible for the policies in question.
Jenrick condemning an attack as barbaric while having been the minister who processed the suspect’s visa is not a subtle irony. It is a specific, documented sequence of facts that a community note captured in two sentences. Whether that note reaches the people who saw Jenrick’s original post is another matter – but for those who saw both, the question it raises is straightforward: what exactly is Reform offering that the government its members ran did not?
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