At some point the good ship Conservative will run out of lifeboats. When that moment arrives, former MPs will need to learn how to tread water without clinging to the life-ring that Nigel Farage, grinning like a seaside pier entertainer, tosses from the deck of HMS Reform.
Twenty Conservatives have now jumped ship. Danny Kruger. Nadhim Zahawi. Andrea Jenkyns. Nadine Dorries. Anne Widdecombe, it's like the guest list for a wake. The list has proved a sore spot at Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ to its dwindling band of devotees) where functionaries have been all too keen to stick the boot into their former comrades.
One insider, whose thumbs must have been smoking, dispatched a series of rat emojis to desperate reporters.
Rats fleeing a sinking ship? But many of those scurrying across the gangplank are the very rodents who gnawed the holes in the hull. They steered her onto the rocks, they opened the seacocks and now they blame the Captain.
One need not be an Oxford don to recall that many on this sorry roster were present in Parliament when the very catastrophes upon which Mr Farage now mounts his assault were perpetrated.
Some were even on the front bench making the decisions they now deplore. Zahawi, (former Chancellor don't you know?) one sat bestride the party as its Chairman.
Jake Berry waltzed into CCHQ on his first day and declared, with the gleeful insensitivity of a man who has forgotten his wife might read the newspapers, that becoming chairman was better than his wedding day. One can only imagine Mrs Berry's delight at this tribute.
These people are not innocent bystanders, clutching their handkerchiefs from the gallery, hearts heavy with patrician lament. They were the crew steering the right into the iceberg. And now they have the brass neck to lecture the rest of us about how terrible everything is whilst joining the man they spent years attacking.
Nadhim Zahawi said a few years ago that he would be afraid to live in a country run by Farage. Afraid! The words issued no doubt from trembling lips. Now it seems he has overcome his crippling terror, the night sweats have abated, the shaking has stopped, and joined Mr Farage. What changed? Did Farage suddenly become less frightening? Or did Zahawi realise his political career was dead and Reform offered the only lifeboat?
Many of these defectors built handsome portfolios of anti-Farage invective on social media. Tweets mocking him, statements condemning him, and dire warnings delivered with quivering sincerity about his dangerous politics. All of it now conveniently forgotten (or deleted, Mr Zahawi) and explained away as a passionate disagreement between allies.
These are not principled defections, these are acts of career preservation dressed up as conviction politics.
For Mr Farage - the match lighting arsonist at the bonfire - the mistake is surely obvious. Reform runs the serious risk of losing the most solid ground that it has: it is not the establishment, it is not burdened by their mistakes. But the more Tories they take on, the more it risks becoming less a political movement and more a retirement home for failed Tory MPs desperate to cling to relevance.
How long before it becomes simply a lifeboat for Conservatives looking to win back seats - or in Kruger's case, hold the ones they have?
The tragedy is that Reform has something genuine. For the first time in years, a Farage-movement represents more than just protest, it now channels the very real anger held at a system many think is broken. Farage's ace up his sleeve is that he is seen as giving voice to people who feel left behind by both 'main' parties.
Whatever one thinks of Farage, he has tapped into something very real.
But as Reform fills up with the very Tory MPs whose failures their new leader argues created that anger in the first place, it risks becoming precisely what it claims to oppose: the establishment in different clothes.
These are not fresh faces bringing new ideas, this is the old guard trying to rebrand. The same politicians who presided over mass immigration, economic stagnation, and Conservative collapse now lecturing voters about how to fix Britain.
It is like hiring an arsonist to run the fire brigade.
Voters are not fools, they can very easily spot blatant opportunism. They know these MPs are not joining Reform because of some Damascene conversion to Farage's vision. They are joining because the think that the Conservative Party is finished and Reform is the only show in town.
The danger for Reform is that it becomes the Conservative Party Mark II, with the same personnel, delivering the same failures, but wearing a different rosette. And if that happens, where do the voters who actually believed in Reform go? Back to Labour? To the Liberal Democrats? God held us, the Greens? Or do they simply give up on politics altogether?
Farage should be careful, for every Tory MP who defects brings with them, baggage. They bring accountability for the very policies Reform now campaigns against and they might bring name recognition and media experience, but they also bring the rank stench of failure.
Reform succeeded because it was not the Conservative Party. If it becomes indistinguishable from it, what is the point?
Twenty defections sounds impressive, but twenty retreads from a failed government jumping ship when the game is up? That does not look like strength, that's desperation on both sides.
The Conservative Party appears somewhat jubilant at the defections, and they are right to be so. If Reform keeps welcoming in the people who killed the Conservatives in the first place, it may find itself inheriting not voters, but their failures instead.
