Something Defective

Natalie Elphicke is being paid £600 per day to chair the Defence Homes Strategy Review. Defecting MPs do well, and they almost always defect in one direction. It has been 48 years since a Labour MP last joined the Conservative Party, and that was only the third time that it had ever happened. Both of the earlier cases had been in 1948, and both had been over the nationalisation of steel. Yet eight Conservative MPs have joined the Labour Party in the last 30 years alone, an average of one every four years, always without having recanted any part of their previous records. That said, Elphicke has always supported the two-child benefit cap, so she has had nothing to recant there.

In 2013, Dan Poulter had been the Minister who had sold 80 per cent of Plasma Resources UK to an American private equity firm. Yes, that was as part of the Coalition, for every aspect of which both parties to it remain responsible. But even so. In 2012, Poulter had resigned from the BMA because it had voted to strike. Last year, the Labour Party welcomed him with open arms. "My party has left me" never, ever leads to the follow-up question, "Yes, that may have been why you left your old party, but why have you joined this one?" Five Conservative MPs got away with that as they defected to Labour in the Blair years, in one case the night before Gordon Brown became Prime Minister.

Elected to the last Parliament as a Conservative, Christian Wakeford was rapidly made a Labour Whip in it, and remains so in this one. Peter Temple-Morris was ennobled. Shaun Woodward was put in the Cabinet. Alan Howarth had been an architect of the Poll Tax, but it was like Howarth before him that Quentin Davies was made a Minister and then a Peer. Brown rapidly made Davies a Minister for the first time in his life, but he had been elected as a Conservative MP at all five of the 1987, 1992, 1997, 2001 and 2005 General Elections, and he had served in the Shadow Cabinets of Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard. The Conservative Party had taken an awfully long time to leave him. On defecting from Howard's party to a warmly welcoming Tony Blair's, Robert Jackson stated that he wanted to be in a party that was led by a Christian. Did someone say something about anti-Semitism? And Keir Starmer has put Elphicke on the equivalent of a £156,000 per year. Groaning under Kemi Badenoch, people will have noticed.