Nigel Farage’s Reform has chosen to make crime the centrepiece of its summer campaigning, with the leader vowing to halve it within five years if he takes power at the next election.

It’s perhaps no coincidence, then, that its latest defection from the Conservative Party wasn’t afforded the usual Westminster press conference unveiling but sneaked out via an article in the Spectator. Because Adam Holloway has taken a rather more sympathetic attitude to criminals – at least when they were his fellow Tory MPs.

Holloway, MP for Gravesham for 19 years and a junior minister under the Liz Truss interregnum, was one of five Tory MPs found by the Commons Select Committee on Standards to have breached the code of conduct in 2021. The five had written to the Lord Chief Justice to try to influence a judge not to release character statements they had written for former Conservative MP Charlie Elphicke, who had been found guilty of three counts of sexual assault and sentenced to two years in prison.

The following year it emerged that Holloway had provided a character statement used as part of the defence case in the trial of another former Conservative MP, Imran Ahmad Khan, who was found guilty of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy. Khan was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

And the same year Holloway was one of the most vociferous public supporters of Boris Johnson during the Partygate crisis, lashing out at the BBC for blowing the issue out of proportion and making the then prime minister look like “some sort of Hannibal Lecter”. Johnson was subsequently fined by police for breaking lockdown rules.

“If you’re a criminal, I am putting you on notice today that from 2029 or whenever that may be, either you obey the law or you will face very serious justice,” said Farage last month. Unless you’re a Tory MP, his newest recruit might say, in which case we’ll turn a blind eye!