Has Starmer really just shot himself in the foot?

Natalie Elphicke is not the average voter’s idea of what a Labour MP should be.

The Dover MP humiliated the prime minister yesterday by taking part in a stage-managed defection to the Labour Party immediately before PMQs kicked off in the Commons, leading to much amused banter and a confident performance by her new boss, Keir Starmer.

The headlines help tell the story Labour wants told: the second Tory MP in a fortnight to abandon the Conservatives reinforces the narrative that the Government is on its last legs and that Rishi Sunak is staring down the barrel of inevitable defeat. If his own MPs are leaving, why shouldn’t voters follow suit?

And then there’s the other side to the story: the Labour MPs and activists who are not comfortable sharing a party with a woman who was one of Liz Truss’s most strident supporters and was, until yesterday, seen as more at home on the Conservative Right than at a trade union meeting. This is the woman who publicly criticised her ex-husband’s victims after he was imprisoned for sexual assault.

Recent political history is peppered with similar (though far from identical) events, although defections direct from Labour to the Conservatives are extremely rare compared to the other way around. In the mid-1990s Labour was an attractive sanctuary for moderate Tories who had lost faith in John Major’s party. They knew they would find a warm welcome in Tony Blair’s eager embrace.

In the (mostly off-the-record) criticism of Elphicke’s acceptance as a comrade, there are shades of the complaints that were uttered when Shaun Woodward, the Conservatives’ former director of communications, defected to Labour just two years after entering parliament as a Tory MP in 1997. Blair ignored the misgivings and Woodward went on to enjoy a relatively successful ministerial career under both Blair and Brown.

But Elphicke’s defection poses a more difficult problem for Starmer. She does not – some might suggest she will never – fit easily into the people’s party given her political record. Of course, every MP of whatever stripe has a record of saying mean things about political opponents. But there are those in Labour who worry that this defection could, in the medium term, inflict more damage on Starmer than on Sunak. Voters tend not to like cynicism.

Yet while denizens of Westminster can recite in detail the charge sheet against Elphicke, it’s unlikely that most ordinary voters could. That is because they don’t care. All they see are the headlines: another Tory MP deserts a sinking ship. Is it any wonder Starmer could barely suppress his delight as his newest party member sat behind him when he faced off against the prime minister yesterday?

Is Starmer’s embrace of Elphicke dishonest? Opportunistic? Cynical? On all three counts, it surely is.

But Starmer is not in this game to lose honourably. He’s in it to win it. He’ll get a single chance to take his party into government at the next election; if he fails he’ll be replaced, and he knows it. It’s often forgotten now, but in the run-up to the 1997 general election, Blair took every available opportunity to advance his party’s chances of victory. When he warned against complacency, he wasn’t doing so for show; he meant it. In hindsight, of course he was going to win. But at the time, it often didn’t feel that way. The memory of four successive general election defeats, of nearly two decades of soul-crunching, despairing opposition took its toll.

Elphicke’s abandonment of the Government may have been undertaken for a host of reasons, not all of which would benefit Labour were they to come to light. And perhaps her willingness to find a home in Labour says something unappetising about where the party is now on the political spectrum.

But none of that matters more than the mission to win. Starmer’s job is not to mollycoddle sensitive activists who fret over what sort of company their leader is keeping. Yesterday Kate Osamor was readmitted to the party after making some comments about Gaza and the Holocaust which many regarded as appalling. She and Elphicke make unusual bedfellows and neither adheres to the ideal of what a Labour MP should be.

But this isn’t a Disney movie. It’s politics. Is Keir Starmer the only person in Labour to get that?