6 FEBRARY 2026 | OPINION
A month where every institution demanded loyalty, then behaved like loyalty was for other people.
January had the mood of succession on repeat. Everyone wanted loyalty. Parties wanted it from MPs. Government wanted it from voters. Institutions wanted it from the public. Then, the same people treated loyalty as something other people are supposed to provide.
Loyalty, in politics, is meant to be the stabiliser. It is the promise that your vote, your service, your taxes, and your patience will not be treated as disposable input. Betrayal is not always a dramatic knife. Most of the time it is the shrug, the delay, the procedural dodge, the policy climbdown delivered with a smile and a statement about “listening”.
In January, loyalty wasn’t a principle. It was a weapon people aimed at everyone else.
You are here for the pattern. Loyalty was the advertised product. Betrayal was the delivery experience. And the only grown-up question, once the shouting stops, is the one Westminster keeps hoping you will not ask: “Fine. So, what are you going to do about it?”
If loyalty is the glue, January proved it failing.
The Great Escape Artists of the Right
The Right supplied January’s loudest loyalty crisis because it did it in public, while insisting it was all moral. Political defections are always sold as conscience. They are also career management. This wave mattered because it signalled a structural shift: Reform UK is no longer just a protest vehicle. It is becoming a refuge for people who want to survive the Conservative Party’s collapse.
The sequence told its own story. Nadhim Zahawi went first, a former Chancellor-level figure whose role was obvious: reassure donors and normalise the idea that jumping ship is not just permitted, it is sensible. Robert Jenrick followed, another heavyweight name, another attempt to make Reform look like it has a bench, rather than just a megaphone. Andrew Rosindell added some ideological texture. Suella Braverman arrived later with the kind of profile that turns any political room into an argument.
It’s not Game of Thrones. It’s worse. Everyone insists they’re the adult.
The betrayal geometry runs three ways. Conservatives call it treachery, but it also exposes how hollow the party has become. A party that cannot keep its own people cannot sell itself as the nation’s stabiliser. Reform, meanwhile, betrays its own anti-establishment story by absorbing the kind of political class it used to sneer at. The more establishment the defector, the more theatrical the ‘outsider’ brand must become to keep the base from noticing the join.
Then, there is the betrayal that voters actually feel. Defectors keep their seats. They do not ask the electorate for permission. They do not call by-elections, despite years of moral lecturing about mandates. Nigel Farage built a career by saying the political class treats rules as optional for insiders. January proved him right, only now the performance sits under his logo. The system allows for it, which is precisely why people hate it. When politics looks like a closed shop, loyalty drains out of the floorboards.
When a representative changes the label, the voter does not experience ‘conscience’. They experience being traded.
By the end of the month, the Right’s loyalty story looked less like principle and more like insurance.
Loyalty Tests for People Who Forgot What Loyalty Was
Defections are theatre. Discipline is the machine. January’s second strand was the Conservative leadership trying to impose order through loyalty tests and purges, the kind of internal policing that reads like strength to activists and like panic to everyone else.
Kemi Badenoch’s posture is easy to explain. Her party is fractured, donors spooked, members furious, and Reform snapping at their heels. In that context, loyalty demands are a rational tactic. But tactics are not virtues. If you have to demand loyalty at gunpoint, you are no longer leading a coalition. You are managing a hostage situation, with a whip.
A party that has to run loyalty checks is confessing it has nothing else to offer.
Party discipline exists for a reason. It stops a party becoming a public argument. It reassures voters that someone is in charge. When it fails, the public sees a party that cannot govern itself, never mind the country. The irony is that hardline discipline often produces the opposite of what it promises. It convinces MPs that disloyalty is survivable. It teaches activists that ‘principle’ is just factional branding.
This strand closes on competence. A party that spends January testing loyalty is confessing it has run out of answers.
Promises, Procedures, and the Policy That Kept Changing Its Mind
January’s deeper betrayals were quieter. They involved the State’s promises, the ones that underpin everyday consent. If you want to understand why trust is collapsing, stop watching the speeches and watch the paperwork.
Start with Women Against State Pension Inequality. The argument is simple: if you change the rules of retirement, you tell people properly, and you tell them in time for the change to be survivable. When the State changes the rules and the citizen pays the shock cost, that is not modernisation. It is a broken contract. The Labour Party’s added betrayal is political. In Opposition, it used the issue as a banner for empathy. In office, it treated it as someone else’s problem.
Then, Assisted Dying. January’s lesson was not about morality. It was about process and trust. Whatever your view, legislation on life and death should not be handled through procedural games and safeguards that look negotiable. If the State struggles to build and manage the basics, it does not get to demand blind loyalty when it asks families to trust it at the most intimate point of their lives.
The modern British State is brilliant at making promises, and elite at finding reasons not to keep them.
Now, add policy instability, because January delivered a masterclass in a government demanding loyalty, while rewriting its own commitments under pressure. The digital identity climbdown was the cleanest exhibit. A plan sold as compulsory was softened into ‘optional’, once the politics turned toxic. The Government did not abandon the direction of travel. It simply rewrote the terms and called it reassurance. That is not the collapse of policy. It is the collapse of certainty.
And it was not alone. The month’s headlines were thick with the same manoeuvre: soften the farm inheritance tax after protests, scramble business rates relief for pubs after the sector screamed, and keep shifting the welfare story to avoid a rebellion. Add the earlier reversals on winter fuel payments and the grooming gangs inquiry, and you get a style of governance that treats policy as a draft document until the backlash ends.
Even the democratic calendar was treated as editable. Local elections were postponed or cancelled in some areas, dressed up as a tidy administrative reform. The public heard something else: you can have your accountability back once it stops being inconvenient. In the same month, Parliament pushed through Holocaust Memorial legislation – a reminder that the State loves a ritual of seriousness, it cannot quite stomach the ritual of being judged on schedule.
This strand ends on a brutal truth: a state that treats commitments as drafts should not be shocked when the public stops signing.
Justice for Some, Closure for Nobody
If you want the most British betrayal of all, it is the one where everyone insists they are pursuing justice, while ensuring nobody gets it. January’s Northern Ireland legacy mess was exactly that: law, politics, diplomacy, and grief colliding in a machine designed to keep running, rather than to resolve anything.
After the Troubles, unresolved cases remained. Victims wanted justice. Veterans feared endless legal pursuit. Governments tried to ‘close the book’ without agreeing on what closure means. January’s procedural shifts did not settle the argument. They simply re-ran it.
Betrayal sits on both sides. Families feel betrayed when the system blocks claims and buries cases. Veterans feel betrayed when they face repeated investigations with little prospect of conviction, or when they are used as symbolic offerings to satisfy process. Politicians betray both groups when they talk about “supporting the troops” or “justice for victims” as branding, not as responsibility.
A state that cannot settle its past cleanly struggles to defend its present.
This is not sentiment. It is an operator point. A state that cannot provide clean closure for those it sends into harm’s way will struggle to recruit, retain, and command trust. Loyalty has a cost. Betrayal has an interest rate.
The Midlands, Where the Plot Stopped Being Subtle
January’s betrayals were not evenly distributed. The Midlands became the month’s case study in what happens when institutions drift and then demand the public pretend it is normal.
Start in Birmingham. The controversy around a local election candidate linked to extremist violence was not just a lurid scandal. It was a governance failure. Screening and civic standards are not optional extras. They are the minimum price of being trusted with power. The betrayal is the State demanding citizens stay loyal to democracy, while doing a poor job of protecting democracy from obvious contamination.
Then, West Midlands Police delivered the month’s sharpest competence collapse around the Aston Villa and Maccabi Tel Aviv match. Away supporters were banned. Justifications were presented with confidence. Under scrutiny, an inspectorate review and an unusually bruising Home Affairs Committee session exposed errors, exaggerated claims, and an embarrassing reliance on AI-assisted material that never should have been treated as intelligence. Confidence drained quickly and the Chief Constable retired.
When policing starts outsourcing judgement to auto-complete, the public starts outsourcing trust to cynicism.
The betrayal came in layers. First, a betrayal of competence: policing is supposed to be evidence-led, not story-led. Second, a betrayal of transparency: facts surfaced through Parliament and media pressure, not through institutional candour. Third, a betrayal of equal citizenship: critics argued that the ban looked like the State responding to the threat of anti-Semitic violence by restricting the threatened group – rewarding the threat, rather than confronting it. You can see the operator dilemma. You can also see the political consequence: every future decision starts from distrust, not consent.
This strand ends with the obvious reflection: once trust collapses, it splashes. It hits councils and safety advisory processes. It hits the Police and Crime Commissioner. It hits every future public order decision, because the public starts asking a question that used to be reserved for cynics: is this evidence, or is this a panic wearing a uniform?
Labour’s Loyalty Problem, Served with a Smile
January also proved that loyalty and betrayal are not a right-wing monopoly. Labour’s month contained its own version of the same story: factional management presented as strategic maturity.
The Andy Burnham saga was the clearest example. A popular mayor sought a route back to Westminster through a by-election triggered when Andrew Gwynne stepped aside. The Labour machinery moved to block him. The leadership framed it as practicality and stability. Burnham’s supporters framed it as a stitch-up to prevent a leadership threat. Either way, the loyalty theme holds. Members are told to be loyal to ‘unity’, while watching the machinery used to police ambition.
Here is the fourth wall break, because everyone in Westminster knows what this is. A leadership under strain tries to remove an obvious rival. A rival is pushed out into the cold. The party tells itself it has avoided chaos. It has also advertised that it fears competition. That is not strength. That is insecurity in a suit.
The succession gossip sat on top of it like steam. Wes Streeting is treated, by both fans and critics, as a future claimant, a man building both profile and faction. Angela Rayner’s name still has pull among parts of the party. Ed Miliband is the figure invoked when people want to signal seriousness, without committing to a plot. None of this requires an actual coup to matter. The mere existence of the whisper war changes behaviour. It makes Ministers posture and colleagues keep receipts. Loyalty becomes a currency – hoarded, traded, and weaponised.
This strand closes with next month’s obvious drama. The by-election will not just be a local contest. It will be a laboratory for Labour’s internal control, Reform’s momentum, and the Conservatives’ struggle to look like they still exist.
Geopolitics, or: Loyalty as a Contract
January was a major month for geopolitics, and it kept returning to the same brutal truth: loyalty among allies is not sentimental. It is transactional. Britain is paying for years of pretending otherwise.
China sat at the centre. A ‘reset’ was sold with the usual language of pragmatism and trade, even as the outcomes looked thin. The core betrayal question does not go away. When you prioritise engagement while downplaying coercion, you are asking your values to be loyal to your economic hopes. That tension became physical in the approval of a vast new Chinese embassy complex in London. Ministers insisted that it was a planning decision, not a geopolitical one.
Nothing says ‘clear-eyed strategy’ like pretending geopolitics is a planning application.
Hong Kong dissidents and campaigners saw the symbolism immediately. MI5 has said the risks can be mitigated, but not eliminated. That sentence contains a confession. Mitigated is not eliminated. It means there is still a problem and you have chosen to manage it, rather than avoid it. If you ask the public to be loyal to national security as a first principle, you do not then treat national security as a footnote to a building consent form.
The Chagos Archipelago carried the same dilemma at higher stakes. Sovereignty, history, legal argument, and alliance infrastructure collide around Diego Garcia. One reading says the deal is overdue. Another says it looks like Britain giving away strategic ground under pressure. The deeper betrayal risk for governance is not any single judgement. It is the impression of drift, of decisions made defensively and explained after the fact.
Now add the spectacle. Farage went to the World Economic Forum in Davos, the elite club he built a brand on mocking. If Reform is the outsider movement, January was the month it asked the base to treat entry to the very club it derides as a victory. That is the oldest betrayal in politics: the rebel becomes the insider and demands applause.
The American tone sharpened everything. Donald Trump’s remarks about NATO’s burden-sharing and about troops being “a little way back” from the Afghanistan front line were received as insult. They were also a signal. This White House frames alliance obligations as conditional. It speaks the language of contracts.
When alliances start talking like contracts, smaller countries learn what they are worth.
That is where NATO fits, and where Greenland fits, too. In an era of Arctic routes, minerals, and defence posture, Greenland is leverage. When American politics talks about it in transactional terms, allies hear the same message they heard from Afghanistan. The guarantee has terms.
Iran and Ukraine supplied the month’s final rhythm. Reporting about a US show of force in the Gulf looked like pressure without invasion, narrowing an adversary’s options without owning the occupation bill. Ukraine’s diplomacy kept shifting towards ceasefire mechanics and talk of limits on strikes against energy infrastructure, alongside proposals that floated an external ‘peace board-style’ shepherding. Peace processes are never just about peace. They are about who gets to write the timetable.
This strand ends with the reflection Britain keeps dodging: in a world where loyalty is audited, a country that looks indecisive gets priced accordingly.
Safety, Apparently Optional
Now the crescendo, because it turns January’s betrayals into the hard claim. Government is failing at the first job – keeping people safe – and it is doing it through drift, confusion, and managerial substitution.
Start with migration and capacity. A former army base in Crowborough being used to house asylum-seekers is not ‘a plan’. It is overflow. Ministers will say it moves people out of hotels. Locals will say they have been volunteered into a national policy failure. The betrayal is that the State asks communities for loyalty, then treats those communities as logistics.
Put it on the human scale. The shop-owner wants footfall, not barricades and constant argument. The parent on the school run wants calm, not another national problem dropped on their town with no consent. The asylum-seeker wants stability and a route to work, not another relocation followed by being turned into a talking point. That is what failure looks like when it touches the ground.
Then, low-level order. Shop-lifting rises are not morally complicated. They are an ambient sign of a state losing grip on day to day enforcement and of communities learning that consequence is patchy. Theft is not just an economics story. It is a legitimacy story.
January even turned grooming gangs into another procedural fight, which tells victims exactly where they sit.
Add Defence, because safety is not only about the police. The UK’s military funding gap and procurement delays are loyalty tests in uniform. The State expects soldiers to risk their lives. It expects the public to fund capability. It expects allies to treat Britain as credible. Credibility is not a vibe. It is kit, readiness, and political will.
A country that cannot decide what it believes cannot decide what it will defend.
January’s pattern lands here. Democracy postponed. Promises softened. Justice unresolved. Police credibility shredded. Foreign policy sold as pragmatism and experienced as drift. Migration handled as overflow management. Theft treated as background noise. This is how a country unravels – not with a bang, but with accumulated betrayals that teach citizens the same lesson: the people in charge treat principles as optional.
Conclusion: The Invoice for Drift
January was a loyalty month. Parties demanded it. Institutions requested it. Government assumed it. The public offered it because most people do, until they feel it is being treated like stupidity.
The Government’s problem is not ideology. It is a lack of principle expressed as indecision and process worship. Decisions are delayed, then made defensively, then explained as inevitabilities. Policies are announced like moral statements, then revised like draft e-mails once the backlash arrives. That is not leadership. That is drift with press releases.
The Right demanded loyalty, while selling itself to whoever looked safest. The governing class demanded patience, while watering down policy in public. The State demanded trust, while failing to enforce the basics of order, competence, and security. In January, Westminster behaved as though loyalty is a blank cheque. It is not. It is a contract. Break it often enough and people stop renewing it.
Here is the strike, and it should hurt because it is true. A country that cannot decide what it believes will struggle to decide what it will defend. That is why January mattered. Not because any single event was apocalyptic, but because the pattern was coherent, and it was corrosive.
So, what are you going to do about it? Westminster will keep asking for loyalty. The public should start asking for receipts.
Loyalty is not a blank cheque. January proved that Westminster still thinks it is.
