What Dover really thinks of its hardline Tory MP switching to Labour

They’re well used to comings and goings in Dover. A trading gateway since the Stone Age, in a healthy year far more than 10 million people pass through the Channel port, whether in lorries, in cars, on coach trips, riding motorcycles or travelling on foot. A few more, you may have heard, sometimes arrive surreptitiously in smaller boats.

But there’s one crossing locals in the Kent town definitely haven’t been expecting. On Wednesday morning, a full two minutes before Prime Minister’s Questions started in Westminster, Natalie Elphicke, the Conservative MP for Dover since the 2019 general election, exercised her freedom of movement to wander across the House of Commons floor and settle on the green benches of Labour.

Elphicke’s move puzzled everybody – MPs of both parties and their supporters, political pundits, even Elphicke herself, who momentarily looked unsure where to sit in the chamber – not least because she has been an outspoken critic of Sir Keir Starmer, and was widely viewed as being on the Right of the Conservative Party, especially when it came to illegal migration.

“She’s somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan, isn’t she?” says James Brogan, walking to the supermarket on his lunch break in central Dover. He works in customs clearance – “the only game in town” – and can’t quite work out why she’s done it.

“It surprised me a great deal,” Brogan says. “Her politics are hardly Left-of-centre. She’s not very well liked around here, from what I hear. I work with people who support all parties and we all think it’s very interesting.”

On the kind of bright, balmy day that makes Dover seem an ideal welcome mat for the nation, that’s very much the mood, regardless of who you talk to: general bewilderment that their local MP, who is about as hardline as they come on immigration, could wake up yesterday and decide she’s an avowed Starmer acolyte all of a sudden.

“Yeah, don’t get it. Why has she done that?” says Maxine Read, 56, a carer and Labour voter who lives on the road to Folkestone. “She’s not really known for being anything other than on the Right. And I’ve had to write to her a few times and she’s never replied. So I don’t think much of her.”

With a healthy majority of 12,278, Elphicke was elected in Boris Johnson’s landslide victory in the 2019 general election, succeeding her then husband, Charlie Elphicke (they divorced in 2021). He had been MP since 2010, but stood down as the Tory candidate a month earlier, after facing allegations that he’d sexually assaulted two women in incidents almost a decade apart. He was eventually convicted.

Natalie Elphicke was not a shy newcomer in the Commons, especially after Rishi Sunak became leader. She criticised his Government for failing on immigration, and felt the Rwanda plan wouldn’t work. Instead she favoured a returns agreement with France, arguing in December that “we must turn to diplomacy once again”.

In her statement upon crossing the floor yesterday, she said that in 2019, “the Conservative Party occupied the centre ground of British politics. The party was about building the future and making the most of opportunities for our country.

“Since then, many things have changed. The elected prime minister was ousted in a coup led by the unelected Rishi Sunak. Under [Sunak], the Conservatives have become a byword for incompetence and division.”

Dover, which is twinned with Split in Croatia, knows all about division. Since the end of World War Two it has proven a key parliamentary swing seat. Tory since the Cameron coalition government, electing one Elphicke or another; Labour for three terms before that, with Gwyn Prosser – how Dover’s 71,000 constituents vote tends to reflect the direction of the next government.

It now has a Labour MP, whether it likes it or not, though Elphicke has said she won’t stand at the next general election. The Labour candidate will instead be Mike Tapp, a former soldier who tweeted that he “looks forward to Natalie’s support [...] Natalie has seen that only Labour has a plan to secure our border, and build the homes we need”.

Out for an afternoon walk, retirees Julie and Duncan McKenzie, both Conservative voters, can sympathise with her – to a point. “She’s probably thoroughly fed up with the Conservatives. I understand why she’s gone, it must be difficult if you can’t get your agenda across and you’re met with obstacles at every turn,” Julie says.

Asked if Elphicke is popular, they fall silent. “I think so. Though, thinking about it, we’ve never seen her and I can’t think of anything she’s ever done for us.”

Whatever Elphicke’s true intentions, the protest has been made, and the painful kick in the shins felt by a Prime Minister who must now wake up in the morning wondering just how things will get worse for him today.

Before Christian Wakeford, the elected Tory MP for Bury South, swapped to Labour during the Partygate scandal in 2022, it had been 27 years since an MP had defected directly from the governing party to the main opposition. After Dan Poulter made the same journey two weeks ago, Elphicke is the second in a fortnight.

“I’m bemused. She was quite keen about stopping the boats, and made a lot of negative comments about Keir Starmer and Labour, so you think, ‘Why this, all of a sudden?’” says Susan, a Dover resident who voted for Elphicke in 2019. She now feels “there’s nobody I can think I’d vote for… [Natalie Elphicke] is probably just looking for the next thing, isn’t she? A quango post, a peerage, I don’t know.”

It would be reasonable to say that, in the rank and file beneath Starmer, Labour’s newest comrade hasn’t been welcomed with open arms. Lord Kinnock, the former party leader, told the BBC: “I think we have got to be choosy to a degree about who we allow to join our party because it’s a very broad church but churches have walls and there are limits.” An unnamed backbencher gave a precis of the same sentiment by simply calling the move a “f---ing joke”.

Locally, the Labour leader of Dover District Council, Kevin Mills, told BBC Radio 5 Live that he “had to check yesterday wasn’t April 1” when he was told the news. “I have to say to some degree horror because I have to say Natalie, and before that her husband, are two MPs that I have had consistent battles with... I was extremely shocked that somebody from what I would say is the Right… has decided to join the Labour Party. Extremely concerned, I would say.”

Much of the resentment relates to Elphicke’s reaction to the allegations against her ex-husband, with whom she shares two children. In September 2020 he was sentenced to two years in jail for his offences. After he was convicted, she sold a story to The Sun for £25,000 in which she said he had suffered “a terrible miscarriage of justice” and that one of his victims was “embarrassingly and gushingly obsessed with him”.

On Thursday, she released a statement apologising for those comments. “The period of 2017-2020 was an incredibly stressful and difficult one for me as I learned more about the person I thought I knew,” she said. “I know it was far harder for the women who had to relive their experiences and give evidence against him.

“I have previously, and do, condemn his behaviour towards other women and towards me. It was right that he was prosecuted and I’m sorry for the comments that I made about his victims.”

Whether the people of Dover will accept that apology remains to be seen. In PMQs on Wednesday, Elphicke eventually sat almost directly behind Starmer, and wore a red, white and blue silk scarf. Were the colours to evoke the Union Flag? Or were they to suggest the colours of the two main political parties, with a blank gulf in between?

But if Starmer feels having Elphicke on-side – and allegedly advising on housing policy, as her pre-politics experience was in the housing sector – is a boon to their cause, he may wish to note that some voters in her constituency are now having second thoughts.

Read, who cites housing and migration as “always the obvious” deciding factors of any election in the constituency, is a lifelong Labour voter, and no fan of Elphicke, so she’s been thrown into a state of electoral confusion.

“I will probably still vote for them, but it makes it a little bit more shaky, doesn’t it?” she says. As ever, then, Dover is on the edge. “I don’t even get why you’re allowed to jump ship. This just makes it all the harder to know who to vote for.”