Keir Starmer’s decision to admit the right-wing Conservative MP Natalie Elphicke into into the Labour Party has been met with “bewilderment” by many of his MPs, with others suggesting it underlines the lengths he’s willing to go to in order to win power.
The second defection to Labour in less than two weeks – after Dan Poulter quit the Tories last month — left Starmer “delighted”. He told reporters it showed Labour was “the party of the national interest”.
Dover MP Elphicke’s surprise defection, announced just minutes before Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, has “prompted reactions ranging from delight to anger” from her new Labour colleagues, said the BBC.
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Starmer’s decision to welcome the ex-Tory MP is symbolic of the Labour leadership’s “new mantra”, said Patrick Maguire in The Times. It doesn’t matter what might make your MPs uncomfortable, instead “Be The Voter”, and with it “demonstrate that you are aligned with The Voter’s values”.
And not just any voter. This particular one is “a Leave-voting man in provincial England who backed Johnson over Corbyn in 2019”. Because, as the local elections have now made “painfully clear” for Downing Street, “they are no longer voting Conservative”.
“The point of Natalie Elphicke’s unlikely membership of Dover and Deal CLP [constituency Labour Party] is as simple as that,” said Maguire. “Be The Voter. Let them hear you are so serious about small boats that the MP for small boats thinks you have a better plan than Sunak.” This week has shown just how far Starmer will go “to empathise with The Voter”.
It’s easy to imagine the “glee” that Starmer’s team felt when Elphicke told them she wanted to defect to Labour, said Owen Jones in The Guardian. Right-wing Tory figures such as Jacob Rees-Mogg or Priti Patel “would not be unfair comparisons” to Elphicke. And if a Tory MP of Elphick’s political persuasion “wants a spot in Labour’s tent” then “nobody can accuse Starmer of harbouring some secret lefty agenda”, said Jones.
Although Elphicke won’t be seeking re-election as a Labour MP, it’s clear what her gesture means, said Jones. In her parting statement she lauded Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party for occupying the “centre ground”, suggesting that this is where Starmer has moved to. “Elphicke, in other words, believes that Starmer is the true inheritor of the mantle of Johnson.”
As Labour prepares for power it has been making further efforts to appeal to business, making changes to its “New Deal for Working People” – but risking the ire of Starmer’s union backers.
Several of the key pledges in the policy document, originally spearheaded by deputy leader Angela Rayner in 2021, have now been “weakened”, said the Financial Times, which has seen the new document set to be unveiled later this month. Labour has said the changes were part of efforts to put party policies “into a form that our candidates can campaign on”.
But Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite the Union, Labour’s biggest single donor during the past decade, said the document was “totally unrecognisable from the original proposals produced with the unions. Workers will see through this and mark the retreat after retreat as a betrayal.”
“It is no secret that Labour have been trying to market themselves as the party of business,” said Nimo Omer in The Guardian’s First Edition newsletter. Starmer and his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves have been “wooing the City for quite some time in order to hammer home the message that Labour can be trusted with the economy”.
Labour is due to meet union leaders next week to go through the document, yet the move is likely to do little for the party’s reputation “for u-turning and ditching policies when it looks politically convenient”, said Omer.
What next?
Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting defended Starmer’s decision to accept Elphicke and told The Independent that he had spoken to other Tory MPs about defecting to Labour.
But he said the party would not accept every Tory who might want to switch allegiances. “If Liz Truss were to want to cross the floor, and I don’t imagine she would, I would rather take the lettuce,” he told the paper.
