Westminster is full of clever people who spend a lot of time stupidly making simple things complicated. The story of Nathalie Elphicke’s defection to Labour is a case in point.
This is a simple story, or should be. Someone who used to tell voters to vote Conservative is now telling voters to vote Labour. It’s more proof that the Tories are finished and Labour is the party that represents the biggest share of the electorate. End of story.
Half the PLP seems to have spent Wednesday afternoon messaging the lobby to say how much it offends their sensibilities to share oxygen with someone they disagree with
Yet the undisciplined and self-indulgent reactions from many parts of the Labour party risk telling a very different story: that not everyone is welcome in Labour – and if you think the wrong things, we don’t want you or your vote.
Those Labour reactions are splashed across the papers today and may yet filter through to the wider electorate. There’s certainly enough material to sustain news coverage that could stick in the minds of some voters. Half the PLP seems to have spent Wednesday afternoon messaging lobby correspondents to explain how much it offends their sensibilities to share oxygen with someone they disagree with.
I use that word ‘indiscipline’ very deliberately. Many Labour reactions to the Elphicke announcement suggest it is a party that really won’t enjoy a full-blown general election campaign.
A successful election campaign requires message discipline and a consistent, open offer to as many voters as possible. Feeding headlines telling the public that some people aren’t welcome in Labour meets neither of those conditions.
Nothing I’ve just written constitutes endorsement of Elphicke’s views. She has undoubtedly done and said things with which I disagree. Her defence of a convicted sex offender (her ex-husband) was egregious. I don’t think I’d like to invite her round for dinner.
But there is a significant difference between our social preferences and the business of winning elections. In accepting Elphicke into Labour, Keir Starmer shows that he has grasped this distinction. He understands that winning elections comes down to getting more votes than the other side, and that the best way to do that is by turning their voters into your voters.
This is one of those simple truisms of politics that Westminster often makes very complicated. But it really matters. David Cameron used to speak privately of how dreadful it was to be a Tory leader facing Tony Blair, because of Blair’s relentless focus on turning Tories into Labour voters: ‘Every morning, I would wake up thinking, “what’s that bloody man done to take away my voters now?”’
There are countless differences between Starmer and Blair, but Starmer is the first Labour leader since Blair to show a similar determination to move voters from Con to Lab. His acceptance of Elphicke is proof of it.
Yet the reactions from elsewhere in Labour suggest a party and a movement that has not fully accepted that approach. ‘We have to be choosy to a degree about who we allow to join our party,’ said Neil Kinnock, a former leader venerated in Labour for losing not one but two general elections. (Labour’s views of former leaders are always telling: Kinnock, like his fellow election-losers Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, will always be more popular in the party than the most successful leader in Labour history.)
The risk for Labour now is that the hostile reaction to Elphicke’s defection becomes the story, the message that voters take away from this week. That risk is especially acute because of Elphicke’s seat – Dover.
Dover is the frontline of the small boats debate and while I think the small boats issue is stupid and reductive and a huge mistake by Rishi Sunak, it is something that can hurt Labour if the Conservatives can successfully persuade some voters that Labour doesn’t care about secure borders and dislikes people who do.
Scorning the MP for Dover because she has harsh opinions about illegal immigration is very bad politics for Labour, since it creates a chance for Conservatives to tell voters who also worry about illegal immigration that Labour scorns them too. Remember Gordon Brown and Mrs Duffy, anyone?
If Keir Starmer is prime minister after the next election, he’ll have done something remarkable – leading Labour from the disaster of the 2019 election to victory in one term would be an unprecedented feat.
His successes to date have been built in part on an often unheralded organisational transformation of his party. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the list of Labour PPCs in winnable seats and their messaging. Both show how effectively Starmer’s team have imposed discipline on the selection of the party’s future MPs and those candidates’ public utterances.
That discipline is always hard to impose on Labour, because the party has a long tradition of prizing sentiment, often more highly than political success. Hence that love for election-losing leaders, and hence the significant number of MPs who think that expressing their feelings about Elphicke (and being seen to do so) matters more than the message their party sends to the sort of voters who agree with her.
The odds are that the Elphicke row will be a minor bump in the road as Starmer rolls on towards victory. But his reshaping of the party still has a long way to go. Labour’s leader has a clear-eyed and unsentimental focus on power, but his colleagues’ reactions to that defection suggest a party that is not yet emotionally ready for the compromises of government.
Defective defection / The Elphicke row shows that Labour still needs to grow up
25
1
09.05.2024
Westminster is full of clever people who spend a lot of time stupidly making simple things complicated. The story of Nathalie Elphicke’s defection to Labour is a case in point.
This is a simple story, or should be. Someone who used to tell voters to vote Conservative is now telling voters to vote Labour. It’s more proof that the Tories are finished and Labour is the party that represents the biggest share of the electorate. End of story.
Half the PLP seems to have spent Wednesday afternoon messaging the lobby to say how much it offends their sensibilities to share oxygen with someone they disagree with
Yet the undisciplined and self-indulgent reactions from many parts of the Labour party risk telling a very different story: that not everyone is welcome in Labour – and if you think the wrong things, we don’t want you or your vote.
Those Labour reactions are splashed across the papers today and may yet filter through to the wider electorate. There’s certainly enough material to sustain news coverage that could stick in the minds of some voters. Half the PLP seems to have spent Wednesday afternoon messaging lobby correspondents to explain how much it offends their sensibilities to share oxygen with someone they disagree with.
I use that word ‘indiscipline’ very deliberately. Many Labour reactions to the Elphicke announcement suggest it is a party that really won’t enjoy a........
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