Parliamentary defectors are a strange breed. It takes remarkable ideological flexibility, a very specific set of priorities, or a major personal crisis of faith – sometimes all three – for an MP to change parties, after the years of getting selected, standing for election, then fighting through Westminster’s combative maelstrom of tribal party politics.
Deciding to take that plunge, then very publicly crossing the floor – literally, in the case of Natalie Elphicke last week – must be intimidating.
It’s also discomfiting afterwards. There’s no guarantee that your new colleagues will accept someone who, the day before, they viewed as an enemy, either immediately or, indeed, ever.
When Quentin Davies, the well-to-do Conservative, switched to Gordon Brown’s Labour Party in 2007, a tale did the rounds in Westminster that he supposedly startled his new socialist friends by turning up to a “dress-down” gathering of the Parliamentary Labour Party wearing brightly coloured corduroys and a cravat.
(That story, I must say, was very possibly a myth, and therefore unfair, but it’s both fun and riffs on the often uncomfortable nature of defection, so I repeat it here with my apologies to Davies. Labour made him a peer for his trouble, so I imagine the addition of ermine to his wardrobe helped him to get over any unjust sartorial rumours.)
As well as cultural and ideological discomfort, there’s the tribal factor. A lot of politics operates on trust, but a defector arrives having just betrayed their own party, which does not necessarily inspire confidence.
That said, it’s rare to defect twice – Winston Churchill, who defected from Tory to Liberal in 1904, then back again in 1924, is said to have declared that “anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat” – and various defectors have, over time, blended right in to their new homes.
Having picked up two defectors from the Tories in a fortnight, Sir Keir Starmer is acquainted with the strange, cloak-and-dagger process of defections: the secret talks, the back-channels, the paranoia and plotting. But his real difficulties came after the news was out. He is currently facing some criticism for his openness to accepting those former Conservatives.
For some in Labour, this is a matter of purity – an outgrowth of the tendency on some parts of the left to view their opponents on the right as actively, irredeemably wicked, rather than simply mistaken, wrongheaded or misinformed.
It’s not long ago that for some Corbynites the very idea of appealing to Tory voters was a bridge too far, so the prospect of giving the Labour whip to anyone who has spent time as a Conservative MP is, predictably, anathema.
Rather more have an issue with specific views and actions, however. Dr Dan Poulter, Starmer’s first new recruit, arrived without much personal controversy beyond the general issue of being a defector in the first place. Elphicke, the MP for Dover, is a different matter. Politically, she wasn’t viewed as being on the left of the Conservative Party, or even of the ERG, never mind the left of politics generally.
Nor did she appear to have been on a protracted journey from her old position to her new view – on the day of her defection, her constituency newsletter went out denouncing Labour for having “no plan”, offering instead a route “back to square one” and “uncontrolled immigration”.
Ideology and policy aside, her criticisms of the victims assaulted by her former husband – remarks for which she has now apologised – jarred with various Labour MPs and activists.
This all produced growing disquiet about the Labour leader’s decision-making.
Some of his MPs started muttering: was Starmer right to have accepted these defectors? Of course he was.
Are these perfect politicians, or perfect human beings? No.
Will either of them bring great expertise to the government Starmer hopes to form? I doubt it.
Had voters actually heard of them before the last fortnight? Unlikely.
Might they – whisper it – be doing this not for principle but for self-interest? Very possibly. It wouldn’t be unheard of, but ultimately it’s irrelevant.
Starmer is not St Peter, and the allocation of the Labour Whip is not admittance to the gates of heaven. His purpose is not to apply a purity test – or even a talent test – to those he lets in, but to fight and win the election campaign which, while formally undeclared, is already well underway.
Defections are a doubly useful tool in doing so.
First, they allow Starmer to communicate a political mood: people want to join Labour and see it as offering them a political future. Conservative MPs are abandoning hope, and losing faith in the Prime Minister. The Labour Party is a broadening church while the Government is preaching to a shrinking congregation. Voters who feel uncomfortable when they think of Toryism might also want to look again at the alternative.
Second, these events are mortar bombs launched into the Government’s campaign headquarters in Downing Street and CCHQ. They force Sunak and his party off their own script, off their agenda, and off their campaign plan, and make them react instead to Labour’s actions. Defections are particularly damaging because they chip away at the ability of Conservatives to trust one another, which further erodes their campaigning effectiveness.
Think of Labour’s defectors as the equivalent of Vote Leave’s big red NHS bus. They cause controversy and discomfort among some on their own side, but they also destroy the carefully laid plans of their opponents, and force those opponents to talk about Starmer’s news rather than their own, even when they’re complaining.
That’s an effective job, in campaigning terms. Expect Labour to keep on doing it.
Mark Wallace is chief executive of Total Politics Group