WHEN a fraud embraces a man who menaces education, and call themselves the future, the rest of us need to start counting our spoons.

“Fraud” was how Nigel Farage described his fresh-minted bestie Robert Jenrick just five months ago. Can’t be trusted with a school was Jenrick’s considered evaluation of his new party boss not so far back.

Now they preen as the government-in-waiting, preparing to take Britain into uncharted territory off the right side of the map.

The ejection-defection two-step on Thursday, which saw Kemi Badenoch drum her shape-shifting shadow justice secretary out of the Tory Party in the morning only for him to pop up at Farage’s elbow as the latest Reform trophy scalp in the afternoon is in one sense an unremarkable tale of thwarted ambition and court intrigue — Macbeth without the poetry, characters, narrative potency or blood but retaining the toil and trouble.

Jenrick’s career has been marked by no great consistency of principle, as well as by breaking the law in the interest of a rich party donor, the former pornographer Richard Desmond. However, he had lately ended up on the far right of the Tories, the sweet spot for those seeking its leadership.

He was plainly unreconciled to his defeat by Kemi Badenoch for the succession to Rishi Sunak and has since devoted himself to building a personal platform as the leader of the hard-right current running increasingly strong in British politics, even aspiring to outflank the egregious Farage from time to time.

This platform was initially in the service of a bid for the leadership of the Tories. Badenoch more-or-less wasted her first year in office, the Tories continue to poll well below their worst-ever election result of 2024, and Reform poses an existential threat to a party which is styled the most successful in human history by those who have never heard of the Communist Party of China.

Since the May elections look like eviscerating the Tories still further, perhaps pushing them towards the margins of political life, it was assumed that the moment would soon be ripe for pushing Badenoch out.

Since Jenrick would almost certainly get on the ballot in the poll for her successor, and since the Tory membership almost invariably plump for the most objectionable rightwinger on offer — they even chose Liz Truss, for God’s sake — he must have felt that destiny was about to reach out and tap him on the shoulder.

But wait. Badenoch has undergone something of a revival in recent months. She made what was held to be an effective Tory conference speech last October and has upped her Commons game, regularly worsting the robotic, and malfunctioning, Keir Starmer. She has somewhat dialled down the culture-war combat and focused on socio-economic misery instead, an inexhaustible source of material at present.

These are Westminster dramas that do very little to shift the dial of public opinion. Those of us of a certain vintage can remember Jim Callaghan swatting Margeret Thatcher aside at the despatch box like an irritating fly and much good it did him.

However, Badenoch has cheered up her back-bench MPs, who no longer feel they are necessarily backing a three-legged nag in the Derby. Since they are the only people who could precipitate her eviction, that matters.

So it must have dawned on Jenrick that the fickle finger of fate might not be tickling him for the foreseeable. He can also read the opinion polls and could calculate that since Reform is clearly the bandwagon du jour it is as well not to be the last chancer to climb aboard.

Trailing in the wake of Nadhim Zahawi and other deadbeats from the 14 years of Tory misrule in taking the Farage shilling is not a great look for a man of destiny after all.

Jenrick’s other calculation seems to have been the realisation that the public are not going to forgive the last Tory government sufficient to offer the Conservatives another go in office any time soon. In saying that the Tories “broke” Britain, he is at least aligning with a universally held perception,  but it is no mandate for soliciting floating votes in 2029.

Of course, Tory Jenrick could still aspire to a shot at the party’s leadership at some point. That is not a career path open in Farage’s Reform. Those who take it into their heads that they might do a better job than the party’s founder-owner have political prospects no better than a revisionist running-dog in 1967 Beijing.

Consider reactionary businessman and Lowestoft MP Rupert Lowe. He answered back to teacher and, although he does not sleep with the fishes, he does now sit glum between Unionist uber-hardliners, the Independent Alliance and the ineffable Rosie Duffield on the miscellaneous bench at the back of the Commons chamber.

Still, there may be a twist. Jenrick brings government experience and political brutality to Farage’s carnivalesque outfit. If there is a knife-fight afoot, Jenrick brings an actual knife rather than a pint pot and a packet of fags.

There is still some doubt that Reform’s leader actually wants to run the country. If Farage were to enter Downing Street he would have to exit various very lucrative side-hustles. He would also have to show up for work, although his model Donald Trump seems to have managed to leverage the Oval Office into a personal profit-centre despite never actually setting foot in it until around noon.

So there is a serious prospect that Jenrick could, formally or informally, end up master-minding any Reform-led regime. There is no point in getting into the whole cholera or cancer thing, but Jenrick’s boundless cynicism does make the case that he is more alarming than Farage.

As for Badenoch, conventional wisdom has her strengthened by virtue of having done something decisive. Certainly, for that small minority who follow Westminster politics as a spectator sport her spiking of the odious Jenrick’s guns was prime time.

Yet she is far from out of the woods — unsurprisingly, as Truss and Boris Johnson left their party in the middle of an Amazonian rainforest without a map. And if the May polls do still prove too much for the Tories to put up with, in pole position for her successor would be James Cleverly, former home and foreign secretary, relative moderate and allegedly affable bloke.

Certainly those Tory MPs who have put up with Badenoch for fear of Jenrick can now recalculate. They could seek to impose Cleverly on the not-quite-a-corpse of the Conservative Party without troubling the recalcitrant membership, as they did with Rishi Sunak in the wake of the gothic drama of Liz Truss.

A Conservative shift towards the centre is nevertheless unlikely while it is haemorrhaging voters and has-been parliamentarians to Reform on the right, the more so since the “centre” is now justifiably regarded by millions as the source of so many of our discontents.

One alternative to that bankrupt disposition is now clear. Given the opportunity, Farage and Jenrick will launch a frontal assault on democratic norms and trade unionism, unleash the most hostile environment yet for ethnic minorities, push millions into poverty through the gutting of welfare, try to suppress the Palestine solidarity movement, align with Trump internationally in a policy of hyper-militarism and war, and further enrich the plutocracy, posing the while as people’s champions.

That is the fraud, and there the menace. Above and beyond Thursday’s melodramas the shadows grew a little darker.