Good morning. Rishi Sunak will say the next five years will be characterised by incredible rates of change and challenge for the UK. I have many thoughts about the prime minister’s strategy here, but I think they are better aired once he has delivered his speech in full rather than just off the back of the pre-briefed extracts.
One reason why Keir Starmer’s predicament over his latest defector is more important is because it is overwhelmingly likely that Starmer will be prime minister after the next election. Some more thoughts on the row Labour is having below.
Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Read the previous edition of the newsletter here. Please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to insidepolitics@ft.com
Dover and done with
Political parties value defections because they believe they send a useful signal to voters about how a party has changed. Earlier in this parliament, the defections of former MPs Luciana Berger — rejoining Labour from the Liberal Democrats — and Louise Ellman — rejoining Labour having quit the party in 2019 — were important signals to the parts of the UK’s Jewish community that voted Labour in 2010 and 2015, but did not in 2017 or 2019.
Back in May 2022, when Labour enjoyed the kind of steady-but-small poll lead that is usually associated with an opposition party that is going to lose the next election, Christian Wakeford’s defection to Labour was a signal that Conservatives should look with fresh eyes at Starmer’s party.
This stuff can really matter in terms of voter perceptions of the parties. In February 2019, when seven Labour MPs quit Corbyn’s Labour party to set up the Independent Group, it triggered a defection of Remain voters to the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. For much of the 2017 parliament, Labour’s resilience with Remainers — even while the Labour party’s position remained explicitly pro-Brexit — allowed Corbyn to avoid shifting Labour’s position to supporting a second referendum on the UK’s EU membership.
The shift in perceptions caused by those defections helped lead to Labour’s poor performance in the 2019 local elections and a genuinely catastrophic showing in the 2019 European elections. That forced Corbyn to move Labour to an explicitly anti-Brexit position in order to shore up the majority of Labour MPs with pro-Remain constituencies, which in part cost them the general election and most of the seats of Labour MPs with Leave-majority electorates.
So this stuff does actually have the potential to matter a lot. But all defections are double-edged: they say something about a party not just to the voters they attract but the voters they repel, too. That’s part of why defections tend to cause rows within their parties even while their leaders crow about them.
Those are the generalised factors driving Labour’s row over their latest defector, Natalie Elphicke, the MP for Dover, but there are also specific ones at play too. The Labour leadership wants to play up Elphicke’s previous hardline positions on immigration as a signal that Rishi Sunak has failed on the issue. But that means that they aren’t downplaying her other previous political positions — ones that put her on the right of the Tory party.
That is very different to Wakeford’s defection, which came after he had been the lone Conservative to vote with Labour on employment protections, or to that of Dan Poulter, a psychiatrist, who did so playing a tune that Labour likes to hear about the Conservative party’s management of the NHS.
That signalling of Elphicke’s previous rightwing stance is much more uncomfortable for Labour MPs as a class, and even more so for the dozen or so Labour MPs who will face serious challenges in their own seats on their left flank at the next election.
But a bigger problem are Elphicke’s specific positions on other issues — her previous advocacy for her ex-husband Charlie Elphicke in his trial in particular.
It’s true that most of the politicians who are publicly criticising Labour are reliable critics of the Labour leadership, such as Matt Wrack, the general secretary of the FBU, the firefighters’ union, and the current TUC president. In a letter obtained by the Guardian, Wrack, a staunch internal opponent of Starmer, said that Elphicke’s views are “incompatible” with Labour membership. On both the party’s ruling national executive committee, at its national policy forum, and the floor of the Labour party conference, the FBU is usually found voting against Starmer. Ditto Zarah Sultana, the Labour MP who criticised the defection on the BBC at the weekend.
But on this occasion, these politicians are only saying what many more loyal MPs are saying in private, and it is bringing back to the fore all of the regular complaints Labour MPs have about the Starmer leadership: that its decision-making is too narrow, too male and too dominated by advisers rather than elected politicians. That adds to concern about how the shadow cabinet, let alone the parliamentary Labour party as a whole, is too often the last group of people to know about the party’s strategy or direction.
Parliamentary defections are generally known by a very tight circle, and most Labour MPs know this: that they are grumbling about it at all is a result of more widespread discontent at how the Labour leadership is set-up. (Though most Labour MPs also say that they think Sue Gray, Starmer’s chief of staff, is a breath of fresh air who is improving relations between the leader’s office and other Labour politicians.)
This side of an election, there are a greater number of voters attracted by the signal that Elphicke’s defection sends, and more effectively distributed by the UK’s electoral system, than those repelled by it. But the discontent at the style and make-up of the Labour leadership’s inner circle is a straw in the wind for the rows that will define how the next Labour government operates.
Now try this
I had a lovely weekend. I saw The Comeuppance at the Almeida, now in its final week but with plenty of tickets still available — an excellent piece of theatre about the age of “the comeuppance”: that period in your 30s and early 40s when you feel as if the decisions already made have shut doors behind you and forced you into paths you don’t want to be in. Alongside Challengers, still showing at cinemas, it is a good month for that particular mini-genre.
Final call for blog submissions to the FT’s student competition, run in partnership with the Political Studies Association and supported by the Association for Citizenship Teaching. Applicants, who can be students of any subject aged 16-19 in schools or colleges around the world, have until May 19 2024 to write 500-600 words on the theme: “What are politicians able to deliver for the next generation of voters?”
Top stories today
Below is the Financial Times’ live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.
