Reform are already sick of Tory has-beens – they don’t want Boris Johnson

Reform UK’s latest defector Nadine Dorries – former pro-Brexit Conservative, I’m a Celebrity alumna and self-appointed scourge of the shadowy deep state – was paraded about the party’s annual conference in Birmingham like a homecoming queen .

Fireworks marked Dorries’s stage entrance. Part of her speech – in which the former Cabinet minister declared that “the Tories are dead” – was greeted with a rare cheer. But the rest of her dreary analysis of an economy teetering on the brink didn’t land well. “Apologies, I didn’t exactly pump up the audience,” Dorries mumbled upon leaving the stage, saved by an awkward hug from party leader Nigel Farage.

Offstage there were reservations that she should have been accepted at all. Reform purists were worried: how many defections from the Tories w