Would Labour MPs really defect to the Tories?

A Sunday newspaper reports that three Labour MPs are thinking of joining the Conservatives. An unconvinced John Rentoul considers the likelihood and explores some of the famous defections over the past few decades

‘Behind you, Sir Keir’ (Reuters)

Three Labour MPs “decided” during last week’s conference in Brighton to “open lines of communication” with Conservative whips about switching parties, according to the The Mail on Sunday. It seems unlikely, on the face of it, that MPs who maintained their allegiance to the Labour Party during the five years of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership would decide that Keir Starmer was such a bad leader that a Tory government would be preferable, but strange things do happen in politics.

The Mail on Sunday reported that the MPs are “in despair at Sir Keir’s failure to make inroads into Boris Johnson’s opinion poll lead” – as well as at Angela Rayner, deputy Labour leader, calling the Tories “racist” and “scum”.

If it did happen, it would be a sensational event. The last Labour-to-Tory defection was Reg Prentice, who was Labour education secretary in 1974-75, switched to the Tories in 1977, and served as a junior social security minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government for two years.

MPs’ changes of allegiance are the hard currency of politics, and often signal fundamental shifts in the balance of power between the parties. Prentice was an early warning not just of the rise of the Bennite left in the Labour Party but of the dominance of Thatcher over the following decade.

In the 1979-83 parliament, the turmoil produced 28 Labour defections and one Tory (Christopher Brockleback-Fowler) to the new Social Democratic Party.

The next significant defection came in 1995, when the direction of traffic changed. Instead of MPs defecting from the Labour Party, Alan Howarth, a Tory former education minister, defected to New Labour. He later served as an education minister and arts minister for four years in Tony Blair’s government, but his change of sides was a premonition of the the Labour landslide. (Two Conservative MPs defected to the Liberal Democrats soon afterwards – Emma Nicholson and Peter Thurnham – but attracted less attention.)

The Blair magic continued to work even after he was elected with a post-war record majority in 1997. Peter Temple-Morris, after briefly describing himself as an independent One Nation Conservative MP, joined the Labour Party in 1998. Temple-Morris gained no ministerial office from the switch, but he was followed in 1999 by Shaun Woodward, who had been a junior shadow minister under William Hague, and who was rewarded some years later, with a junior ministerial post in the Northern Ireland Office after the 2005 election. Two years after that he was Northern Ireland secretary in Gordon Brown’s cabinet.

The day before Brown became prime minister, Quentin Davies became the last of the Tory-to-Labour defectors. Having served on Iain Duncan Smith’s front bench, he became a junior defence minister for the last two years of Brown’s government.

After that, defections became part of the pre-Brexit drama, with Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless defecting from the Tories to Ukip in 2014. Unusually they resigned their seats, fighting and winning by-elections under their new colours, something that had not been tried since Bruce Douglas-Mann, one of the Labour defectors to the SDP, fought and lost a by-election to the Tories in his Mitcham and Morden seat in south London in 1982.

Later, Brexit was part of the cause of another slew of defections from both main parties to Change UK in 2019, with eight Labour MPs and three Conservatives joining the new party. Some of them later joined the Lib Dems; none of them held their seats. If anything, their defections signalled the disarray of the Remain side of the argument, and pointed the way towards Boris Johnson’s election victory at the end of that year.

If any MPs do end up switching straight from Labour to Tory, however, and whether or not they secure ministerial office that way, it would suggest that Johnson was firmly on course to win again.