“ANYONE can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat,” remarked Winston Churchill around the time of his return to the Conservative Benches in the 1924 General Election, having previously left them for a stint as a Liberal some 20 years previously.
While such return crossings of the floor are rare, the tradition of the defection in British politics took a new twist last week with the first ever switch between parties within the National Assembly for Wales. While sitting Members have left or have been kicked out of their parties and have sat as independents between elections (John Marek and Peter Law from Labour; and Rod Richards from the Conservatives), it was not until Mohammed Asghar left Plaid Cymru and crossed the floor of the Assembly Siambr to join the Welsh Conservative benches that a proper defection had ever taken place down at Cardiff Bay.
Mr Asghar’s decision took many by surprise, but the defection would undoubtedly have been weeks in the planning and must have taken a great deal of patience, organisation and above all discretion to ensure that the switch happened at a time and in the manner of the choosing of both the Conservatives and Mr Asghar.
I know from first-hand that the party to which one is switching approaches the prospect of capturing a defector very carefully indeed, with a mix of motivations and competing priorities – to get the deal done as quickly as possible, but doing so while making sure the new recruit is not scared off, nor allowing the prospect of the catch to get out beyond a few select people within the party.
My own experiences cover my role as a defector in my own right, the organiser of a defection and working for a high profile politician after they had defected.
At local council level, defections are relatively commonplace and are often based on rows and fall outs between colleagues in the very personalised and febrile world of local politics. In fact, when I discussed my defection from the Liberal Democrats to the Conservatives back in 2006 with a former Lib Dem MP, she asked me what committee chairmanship I had lost. It is indeed these affronts to pride – or, more accurately, the pocket – which drive councillors across the floor in city, town and shire halls all over the country, almost every single week. Offers made to potential recruits from the other side will most probably be made up of lucrative ‘extra responsibility allowances’ for chairing one of the overview or scrutiny committees, or an even more financially rewarding job with a seat on the authority’s cabinet. It has even been known for defectors to be enticed with the prospect of lording it over their communities as the all-important planning committee chairman.
I had to meet with the Shadow Secretary of State, the director of the party in Wales, the Welsh Conservatives chairman to satisfy all their investigations into me, while my reasons for wanting to join the Party all had to be vetted by party HQ in London. For Mr Asghar, a similarly in-depth process was undertaken. No party should immediately rush into accepting converts – as UKIP found to its price when taking on the flamboyant Mr Kilroy-Silk.
The defector will invariably be described as a walking embodiment of cant hypocrisy and arch disloyalty, or a paragon of virtue, the living example of principle over partisanship, depending whether you’re speaking for the defector’s former or new political party.
One thing that the defector can never be is an unquestioning drone of the party machine, either for the party they leave or indeed the party they join. Perhaps the defector had shown signs of “disloyalty” before the final jump, questioned party policy and indeed may have voted against the party line on more than one occasion. This in turn poses a problem for the party managers in the defector’s new home: will this truculent behaviour continue after the move?
Emma (now Baroness) Nicholson stunned the political world in 1995 when she crossed the floor of the Commons to sit as a Liberal Democrat after representing Devon West & Torridge in the Conservative interest since 1987. She had also held the position of Vice-Chair (Women) of the Conservative Party. Soon after her defection, a small Guardian piece quoted her as saying that the most over-rated personal virtue was “loyalty”. Having had ancestors in both Houses of Parliament since the 17th Century, Nicholson’s family had only been proper Conservatives since one of her great-grandfathers crossed the floor to them from the Liberals in 1871. Perhaps Nicholson saw a longer game approach to political parties and transitory “loyalties” to them?
In the early development of political parties or groupings within Parliament, it was commonplace for Parliamentarians to shift between groups, either because of a specific issue, or to gain advantage, or to help to thwart an opponent. The two great forces of Victorian politics, Gladstone and Disraeli, had both started out as Tory MPs until a mixture of policy issues and conflicting personal loyalties led the two men to become sworn enemies. This famous enmity helped lead to the creation of the first modern political parties.
Gladstone’s journey from Conservative politics, once seen as “the rising hope of those stern unbending Tories”, to the founder of the Liberal Party is not so odd in British politics. Roy Jenkins, the former Labour Chancellor and reforming Home Secretary, went on to found the Social Democratic Party, while his fellow SDP convert and former Labour Foreign Secretary Dr David Owen eventually ended up supporting the Conservatives in the 1992 General Election. None can, in modern time, top the record of John Horam MP, currently the Conservative Member for Orpington, who started out as a Labour MP before stopping by at the SDP and eventually and finally alighting at his current home. Mr Horam certainly could give the Vicar of Bray a run for his money in the adaptability stakes.
One thing remains constant throughout defections: the impact on one’s personal and family life can be intense. Old friends and associates may quickly become new political enemies and often such conflicts are adorned with all the bitterness of familial disputes. Local activists who worked hard to get the defector elected will feel betrayed. There may even be an air of lingering mistrust about the defector, with their new party perhaps not quite knowing where the new boy or girl sits on various issues. The warning that Mr Bligh gave to Mr Christian on leaving the Bounty, that the mutinous crew would be liable to further acts of betrayal may, perhaps rather unfairly, continue to ring in the ears of all those who seek to profit from the acts of a defector.
Defections are part of the very fabric of the British political system, with all parties benefiting and losing out to decisions by politicians at all levels to switch allegiances. It creates a sore feeling among the party that has lost out, and a feeling of euphoria for the party which has gained. But both these feelings remain transitory as most defectors and the parties concerned usually agree that the switch was, perhaps, the best for all concerned.
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