Keir Starmer will regret alienating Labour Party members and women’s rights campaigners by welcoming in the morally and politically tainted Natalie Elphicke, says Morgan Jones
The words “new Labour MP” are music to the ears of many on the left – unless they are followed directly by “Natalie Elphicke”.
A former member of the European Research Group from the right of the Conservative Party, Elphicke hit the headlines in 2021 for criticising Marcus Rashford, who she accused of “playing politics” after his school meals campaign. Her parliamentary career has been most marked out, however, by her involvement in the trial of her husband, and predecessor as Dover MP, Charlie Elphicke.
Mr Elphicke was convicted of three counts of sexual assault in 2020. Natalie Elphicke was temporarily suspended from the Commons in 2021 for attempting to influence the judge in her husband’s trial; she backed his appeal, telling The Sun at the time that “Charlie is charming, wealthy, charismatic and successful — attractive, and attracted to, women. All things that in today’s climate made him an easy target for dirty politics and false allegations”. Since defecting, she has apologised for what she had said: she’s also been accused by then-Justice Secretary Robert Buckland of attempting to lobby him on behalf of her husband.
The reasoning behind welcoming Natalie Elphicke into the Labour Party is obvious: she’s the MP for Dover, and Labour, generally feeling itself to be at a disadvantage in immigration and asylum debates, wants the upper hand in rows over small boats, along with the general embarrassment to the Tories a defection causes. This would be fair enough if Elphicke were and other Tory MP – if she were, for example, Dan Poulter, the Central Suffolk and North Ipswich MP who unobtrusively defected to Labour some weeks ago, to a pleased murmur from Labour MPs and members alike. But she is not. Her politics are notably more extreme; her support for her husband through his sexual assault conviction and her smearing of his victims means that she is both morally and politically compromised.
There are those who argue that Keir Starmer is being pragmatic in welcoming into the fold and that it is the right move strategically. They think that the trade-off is worth it, that this is smart politics. I don’t.
Firstly, consider the polling. Labour is on course to win; the Tories have just been wiped out in the locals. Labour doesn’t need to do anything big or showy – it doesn’t need to take risks, like, for example, admitting a former ERG member – to stay on track. Elphicke won’t stand again so with or without her defection the result in Dover is in all likelihood the same: the party’s candidate Mike Tapp will be elected at some point between now and January. Elsewhere, in the places around the country where Labour lost ground to the Greens at the locals (something General Secretary David Evans has discussed the need to work on), one can easily imagine leaflet attack lines about the party welcoming hard right Tories.
Tory sleaze has been a consistent, and winning, attack line for Labour in the last few years. It was, after all, Tory sleaze – the Pincher affair – that finally brought down Boris Johnson. Labour has won by-elections in Wellingborough, Wakefield, Tamworth and Blackpool campaigning to replace MPs who had fallen foul of the standards commissioner or the law. Lines about standards in public life, and doing things differently, don’t really work if you invite the sleaze in (far from incidentally, Elphicke also had a lucrative 2nd job while an MP, another thing Labour has been vocal about opposing). As Buckland’s lobbying disclosure clearly illustrates, the story of Elphicke’s involvement in her former husband’s trial is not a closed matter: more may very possibly come out, and when it does it will be the Labour Party’s problem.
The decision to let Elphicke become a Labour MP has been met with a mixed response within the party (Labourlist’s readers’ poll found more than 76 per cent thought it was the wrong call). Many people who have spent years in the party fighting for migrants’ rights, or a safer internal party (sexual harassment lawyer and former Labour aide Deeba Syed wrote that Labour’s new MP “abused her position of power and privilege to interfere with the criminal justice process”) or trade union rights (the TUC president described her views and past positions on trade union rights as “incompatible” with the party) feel a very raw anger that the door was opened to this person whose entire career has been a rebuke to them.
If you think this is an irrelevant consideration that big and clever politics can put aside, it isn’t: volunteer hours make the difference in tight races and internal discontent being aired in the press is not good. The leadership should treat the party it’s attached to as a resource, not a nuisance. It’s inevitable that sometimes the leadership will annoy the party: deciding when it’s worthwhile to spend political capital to do so is important. Natalie Elphicke, trailing days of stories about sexual assault, second jobs, and internal hypocrisy across the Labour party’s generally clean, well-polling floor, is not a good use of that capital.