How do you know when the ship is sinking?
Parties are central to British politics: what happens to those who switch sides?
I came of age, in political terms, not under Margaret Thatcher—though she undoubtedly formed the world in which I grew up—but under John Major. It is easy to forget now, but he was prime minister for six-and-a-half years, 20th in the list of longest-serving premiers (there have been, by common consent, 56 since Robert Walpole was recognised in this newly conceived or formalised position as the King’s chief adviser). We think of him, reflexively, as the sputtering coda of the long period of Conservative rule, but he governed (though some of his critics contested this) for a third of those 18 years.
Major’s period of office was a political education of extremes. He was the surprise victor of the contest when Thatcher eventually and reluctantly stepped down (though more acute Kremlinologists should have seen him coming), and, in the strange, light-headed relief of the post-Iron Lady milieu, he surprised again by winning the 1992 general election. Much of that victory was a personal one. True, his greatest strength was probably the simple fact he was not Thatcher (aided by his consequent freedom to abandon toxic policies like the Community Charge), but his approach to campaigning won hearts.
The campaign was not a smooth one. It was bitter and bare-knuckled, and it began to look as if a fourth election win was beyond the Conservatives. Neil Kinnock had transformed the Labour Party in his nine years as leader, helped in so small part by his savagely savvy director of communications, Peter Mandelson, and it seemed as if the party was ready to return to government.
Towards the end of March 1992, John Major decided to change the way he was engaging with the electorate. Advised by the BBC’s John Simpson that he “could be better presented”, and ought to avoid crowds of “true believers” to speak instead to ordinary voters, he produced a rather shabby soap box, a very solid metaphor for his desire for simplicity, stood on it with a microphone, and talked, plainly, simply and directly, to the electorate. The change in tack was dramatic, and he was returned to Downing Street with what was supposed to be an at-least-workable majority of 21.
The collapse of the administration was slow and painful, a death by a thousand cuts. In retrospect, the fatal blow was struck as early as 16 September 1992, Black Wednesday, when the government was forced to withdraw sterling from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Already-high interest rates climbed by several points within a few hours in reaction to currency traders selling huge quantities of pounds, and by the end of the day, while the situation was stabilised, the Conservative Party’s reputation for sound economic management was shattered. From that day until Tony Blair’s landslide victory on 1 May 1997, there was no way back.
As Major’s government lurched from one crisis and scandal to another, his management of the parliamentary party became more and more difficult. By-election losses in seats which should have been impregnable, like Newbury, Christchurch and Eastleigh, hacked away at the arithmetic, and by the end of the parliament every major vote was a potential crisis. The mood among Conservative MPs became rancorous, poisoned by disagreements over Europe, and the party sped towards catastrophe.
The more certain electoral Götterdämmerung became, the more restless and fearful Conservative MPs were. Some came to the conclusion that their home was no longer with the party, and they began to look at alternatives. The first to go was Alan Howarth, the Member for Stratford-on-Avon. In October 1995, he announced that he was leaving the Conservatives and crossing the floor of the House of Commons to join New Labour. It was a hammer blow. He was the first Conservative MP ever to defect directly to the Labour Party, and the first former Tory to sit for Labour since the infamous Sir Oswald Mosley in the 1920s.
It changed the game of politics. In December, Emma Nicholson, the rather aristocratic and disgruntled Conservative MP for Torridge and West Devon, defected to the Liberal Democrats. She protested that she was merely adapting to a new ideological reality: “The Conservative Party has changed so much, while my principles have not changed at all,” she told the BBC’s Robin Oakley. “I would argue that it is not so much a case of my leaving the party, but the party leaving me.” Some of her former colleagues suspected it was more closely connected to her complete lack of ministerial preferment; one had previously remarked “Poor Emma: if only there was a Pulitzer Prize for ambition, she’d win it every year.”
(Nicholson did not contest the 1997 general election, though her seat was retained by her new party. She was ennobled as a Liberal Democrat peer and then sat in the European Parliament from 1999 to 2009. In 2016, however, with typical unpredictability, she rejoined the Conservative Party.)
In February 1996, there was another departure. Peter Thurnham, the Member for Bolton North East, quit the Conservative Party, citing ethical concerns over the Scott Report on arms to Iraq and the failure of standards which led to the Nolan Report. In October, he joined the Liberal Democrats, perhaps his objective all along, though he then stood down from the House in 1997.
These three instances of crossing the floor had an importance far beyond their effect on John Major’s parliamentary management (though they made the job of the whips more difficult). They created in the mind of the public several ideas: that the Conservative Party was so ideologically divided, and in some ways actively toxic, that its elected representatives could no longer in good conscience remain loyal to it; that the prime minister and his whips (more fearsome in those days than now) lacked the authority to hold their party together; and, perhaps most importantly, the main opposition parties, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, were now sufficiently moderate, grown-up and safe that they were potential homes for former Conservatives. If an MP could switch like that, then, it was inferred, voters could certainly do so. In 1997, they did.
I sketch out this tale because, as Liz Truss’s infant premiership comes under extraordinary pressure, there have been rumours that disenchanted Conservative MPs may again consider their long-term futures and perhaps cross the floor. My own view is that it is unlikely. Although a Conservative “Red Wall” MP, Christian Wakeford, crossed to the Labour Party only in January, he was the first to make that journey since Quentin Davies in 2007. To defect from one party to another is an enormous and momentous decision, with consequences that, whether good or bad, will last for the rest of a Member’s political career.
The great example of flexibility towards political identification is, of course, Winston Churchill. He was elected as a Conservative MP for Oldham in 1900, but in 1904, with a long-serving government turning stale (sound familiar?), he crossed the floor to join the Liberal opposition, out of sympathy with his colleagues’ economic protectionism. At the next general election, in January 1906, he moved to Manchester North West, winning under his new banner and being promoted to ministerial office. Two years later, he was appointed to the cabinet as President of the Board of Trade; but at that time, newly nominated cabinet ministers had to submit themselves to their voters for re-election, and Churchill was rejected at Manchester by 429 votes.
It was not a catastrophe. Edmund Robertson, the Liberal MP for Dundee, was ennobled as Lord Lochee, and Churchill won the ensuing by-election comfortably. He was back in the Commons, and over the next 14 years he would enjoy a political rollercoaster, rising to Home Secretary, carrying much of the blame for the disastrous Dardanelles campaign then resigning in 1915, serving in the trenches at Ploegsteert and returning to the cabinet in a series of middle-ranking positions, ending the period of coalition government in 1922 as Colonial Secretary.
At the general election which followed the defenestration of Lloyd George, Churchill was defeated under the Liberal banner in Dundee (losing, with a hint of irony, to our only ever temperance MP, Edwin Scrymgeour). He contested Leicester West in 1923, but was again beaten. In March 1924, with the country’s first Labour government now in office, Churchill contested the Westminster Abbey by-election as an independent anti-socialist: again he was unsuccessful. But his direction of travel was now obvious. His antipathy to the left was profound, and shortly after losing at Westminster, he declared that there was no longer a place for the Liberal Party in British politics. From there it was inevitable: at the October 1924 general election, he was elected for Epping as a “Constitutionalist” (in effect a Conservative) and joined Stanley Baldwin’s new Tory government as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Essex remained his solid electoral home for almost the rest of his life. Returned for Epping until 1945, he switched to the new seat of Woodford, and retained it till his retirement in 1964.
Churchill’s comment on his freewheeling party affiliation is famous and characteristic. “Any fool can rat on a political party,” he observed. “It takes a genius to re-rat.” In truth it was his good fortune and long career which saw him able to prosper under different banners, and he certainly did not take it for granted: when Baldwin offered him his father’s old position of Chancellor in 1924, setting the seal on his return to the Conservative fold, he wept with gratitude and emotion.
In any case, Churchill himself, partly because of his devotion to his own ego, was always somewhat dismissive of party labels. He sat comfortably in the coalitions of both world wars, especially leading the National Government of 1940-45, and before he returned to Downing Street for his second term in 1951, he had been exploring the possibility of some kind of alliance or even fusion between Conservatives and Liberals, the two parties representing an anti-socialist alternative. He was also moved by nostalgia. Forming that government in 1951, he was attracted by the idea of including alongside himself an Asquith and a Lloyd George; Gwilym Lloyd-George, the Welsh Wizard’s younger son and National Liberal MP for Newcastle-upon-Tyne North, was appointed Minister of Food, while Cyril Asquith, H.H. Asquith’s youngest son and a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, was offered the post of Lord Chancellor (though he declined and the disappointed Churchill turned to another law lord, Lord Simonds, whom he had never even met).
But Churchill is a false positive. The dangers of crossing the floor are very high and the likelihood of prospering further relatively low. British politics is a tribal business, and “betraying” your political colleagues to join their opponents generally results in great personal unpopularity. When Nicholson defected and then refused to trigger a by-election, one of her ex-colleagues, Neville Trotter, remarked sourly “I do not know how she can face her constituents now she has turned her coat without putting it to the electorate.” Quentin Davies’s defection to Labour in 2007 prompted the old polecat, Lord Tebbit, to observe “This defection will raise the average standard of members on the Conservative side and lower it on the Labour side.”
The chances of retaining one’s seat are also slender. If you hold a safe seat, you are leaving a large majority and an experienced and supportive constituency association. Overturning a substantial plurality by force of personality alone is a major challenge. It is notable that at the first election after the creation of the Social Democratic Party in 1981, only six Members were returned, despite the presence of 28 SDP MPs in the previous parliament. Two of its four founding members, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers, were defeated, while their leader, Roy Jenkins, held on narrowly only to lose in 1987. This was despite the SDP/Liberal Alliance winning more than a quarter of the national vote.
This is not to say that it is impossible to remain at the front line. Of those Major-era defectors, Alan Howarth switched seats to the safe Labour constituency of Newport East (despite a challenge from beyond the political grave by Arthur Scargill), spent the 1997 Parliament as a junior minister and then was appointed to the House of Lords in 2005. More striking yet, Shaun Woodward, who preceded David Cameron as Conservative MP for Witney, defected to the Labour Party in 1999, found a more secure (if improbable) home in St Helens South in 2001 and rose to cabinet under Gordon Brown as Northern Ireland Secretary. Even Quentin Davies, not notably popular with other Conservative MPs when he was among them and openly loathed after his defection, spent two years as a junior defence minister from 2008.
These are the lucky exceptions. Most who change their allegiance and hope to continue in active politics are disappointed and frustrated, losing their seats in Parliament, their career momentum and their professional friendship networks. They have, after all, committed a prima facie act of betrayal; even if their colleagues can look beyond that, the turncoats have by implication asked questions of conscience which others may not wish to face. After all, if your friend leaves the party to which you both belong because it is no longer fit, that silently challenges your own allegiance and the courage of your convictions.
Of course we accept that people’s opinions can change over the long span of a political career. As she approached the premiership, Liz Truss found herself under attack for having been a Remainer who came to embrace Brexit, and, even more, extreme, a student Liberal Democrat who had advocated the abolition of the monarchy. (Apparently she was at the Liberal Democrat stall at my freshers’ fair in 1994 as a grizzled second-year; I have no recollection of seeing her, though others report that she was enthusiastically, or annoyingly, championing the legalisation of cannabis.)
But that is hardly exceptional. Peter Hain, the Labour cabinet minister under Blair and Brown, had been President of the Young Liberals during the 1970s, famed for his anti-apartheid activism and targeted by the South African Bureau of State Security. Munira Mirza, the head of Boris Johnson’s policy unit, was once a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Vince Cable, the former Liberal Democrat leader, had been a special adviser to a Labour cabinet minister in the 1970s and had then joined the SDP.
Once you have a front-rank career, however, into which category being a Member of Parliament falls, you are generally held to have chosen your horse, and it is usually disastrous then to back another. For this reason, however febrile the atmosphere within the Conservative Party at present, I don’t think we will see MPs quitting for supposedly greener grass. Blair’s New Labour at least offered the probability of an electorally successful new home; Keir Starmer, while currently riding high in the polls, does not seem to me to have the same air of inevitable victory about him.
If—as I think she will—Truss overcomes this current storm and remains in Downing Street until the next general election, there may be disaffected Members of Parliament who start to consider new career paths, as did some under Boris Johnson. They may see no future for themselves under Truss, or they may find the prospect so unappetising that they leave the field voluntarily. But crossing the floor? You will be hated by your old friends, and regarded suspiciously by your supposed new ones. You are unlikely to rise further than you would have done under your old flag. If I could offer some honest and frank advice, I would say simply: it’s not worth it.