A history of defecting MPs

Westminster is abuzz with fresh talk of Conservative MPs jumping ship and defecting to Labour.

The Sunday Times reported that “at least half a dozen Tory MPs” are talking about crossing the floor, “according to insiders in Sir Keir Starmer’s party”. The Telegraph’s Whitehall correspondent Tony Diver said “three male Conservatives” from the so-called Red Wall intake of 2019 were in “formal discussions” about joining the opposition. And The Guardian’s Jessica Elgot said one was in “advanced discussions”, while another was in “close talks with a Labour MP”.

Politico London Playbook’s Eleni Courea cautioned that “Westminster has a tendency to get carried away by this kind of thing”. A report by The Mail on Sunday last October that three Labour MPs were considering defecting to the Tories “never came to anything”, and “generally the numbers that get bandied about are over-inflated”, Courea wrote.

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But party switches do happen and can have significant repercussions, as well as offering lessons to would-be rebels. According to Reuters, a total of 167 MP defections occurred between 1979 and 2019, including 62 in the three years following the Brexit vote. Here are some of the most recent defections.

Christian Wakeford (Conservative to Labour)

Wakeford took the Bury South seat from Labour at the 2019 general election by just 402 votes. But he then crossed the floor to join the opposition in January in protest over Partygate – the first Tory defector to Labour since Quentin Davies in 2007. BBC political correspondent Iain Watson reported that Wakefield had been plotting his switch for “four months, during which his discontent with his own party had simmered”. And “it was he who had first approached Labour four months ago, and not vice versa. The party immediately saw his worth.”

However, in a sign of the contempt in which many MPs hold defectors, Wakeford is being blamed for the current briefings. According to Politico’s Courea, an unnamed MP told colleagues in a WhatsApp group that “these ‘defections’ only exist in the confines of the underpants of the member for Bury South, in a desperate bid to get a shred of credibility with his new whips”.

Phillip Lee (Conservative to Lib Dem)

Amid the political deadlock of Brexit, the pro-Remain Tory MP for Bracknell dramatically defected to the Lib Dems in September 2019. In what The Guardian called “a carefully stage-managed manoeuvre”, Lee walked across the floor of the Commons chamber as Boris Johnson addressed MPs.

Lee’s switch wiped out the prime minister’s majority in Parliament. But some Lib Dem members quit in protest after voicing concerns about Lee’s voting record and views on social issues including equal marriage and HIV-positive immigrants.

The former junior justice minister failed to win re-election as the Lib Dem candidate in Wokingham shortly after his defection. Pink News said his defeat, to incumbent Conservative MP Sir John Redwood, came “as a relief to many LGBT+ Lib Dems members”, after Lee’s “questionable views on LGBT+ rights threw the party into chaos when he was admitted”.

Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless (Conservative to UKIP)

Long-time Eurosceptic Carswell became UKIP’s first ever MP after defecting from the Conservatives in August 2014. He immediately called a by-election and won a new mandate from his Clacton constituency.

Carswell was quickly followed across the chamber by Reckless, who became UKIP’s second directly elected MP by winning a by-election in Rochester and Strood.

The New Statesman’s George Eaton said that “as well as being an obvious gift to Labour, as any defection is, Reckless’s move will also help its efforts to ‘Toryfy’ Ukip, which has begun to make advances in Labour territory”.

In an article for The Independent, then UKIP leader Nigel Farage hailed both former Tories as “heroes” and predicted more defections would follow. That prediction proved incorrect and Reckless lost his seat in the 2015 general election.

And both he and Carswell quit UKIP in 2017. Yet experts have argued that their defections to Farage’s then party significantly shifted the political narrative, legitimising UKIP and helping to trigger the Brexit vote.

Change UK

At the other end of the political (and success) spectrum was the doomed mass defection by pro-Remain MPs to what would become known as Change UK.

The Independent’s Jon Sharman reported that “shockwaves rippled through Westminster” when 11 MPs from Labour and the Conservatives quit en mass in February 2019 to form the centrist Independent Group For Change, which later changed its name. High-profile members of the new party included Tory MP Anna Soubry and former Labour leadership hopeful Chuka Umunna.

Yet the group was beset by policy and logistical difficulties as the members struggled to merge their widely different political views into a coherent policy platform.

After all 11 MPs lost their seats at the December 2019 general election, the party officially disbanded. In a letter to members, Soubry wrote: “Whilst there is clearly a need for massive change in British politics... a longer term realignment will have to take place in a different way.”

According to The Guardian’s Tim Adams, “the new ideals of consensual politics did not work in the heat of media scrutiny of a campaign”. In fact, amid the clash of egos, “far from modelling a new politics, the group started to look like they had brought with them the ingrained habits of rats in a sack”, he added.

Gang of Four (Labour to SDP)

Although not technically a defection, the 1981 breaking away from Labour of the so-called Gang of Four – Bill Rodgers, Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins and David Owen – triggered a political earthquake.

The group quit and formed the Social Democratic Party in protest against Labour’s anti-European stance. The move posed a very real threat to both Labour and the Conservatives, in part because of the high profiles of the defectors, all four of whom had served in the cabinet. Jenkins was a former home secretary, while Owen had been foreign secretary.

Yet despite a surge in public support for the SDP, the party won just 23 seats, in an alliance with the Lib Dems, in the 1983 general election. The splitting of the anti-Tory vote also allowed Margaret Thatcher to win 61% of seats on just 42% of the vote, “helping ensure 18 years of unbroken Conservative government”, said The Telegraph.