According to our former Editor, “the only rule of defections is that there is no rule”. Blame personalities, blame the A-list, blame the size of their majority, blame what they had for breakfast: any attempt to impose a hard and fast rule on why a Tory MP might cross the floor is doomed to failure.
Readers should keep this in mind when contemplating Dan Poulter’s Saturday attempt to spoil Rishi Sunak’s better-than-terrible. The MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, NHS doctor, and former Health Minister defected to Labour, pointing to the state of the health service as justification.
Nobody denies that the post-Covid NHS is in poor shape. Despite the record levels of funding delivered by successive Tory governments, surging waiting lists, striking junior doctors, and the challenge of our ageing and bloated population have left our beloved socialist dumpster fire in a critical condition.
Nonetheless, there’s a leap between a Conservative MP being honest about the problems the health service faces, and deciding the answer is Keir Starmer. That’s especially true when Labour’s only solutions seem to be vague promises of more money and a few nice words about Singapore.
Poulter sits on a majority of 35, 253, and has announced he won’t be running again at the next election. Despite a suggestion he might start advising Starmer on mental health policy, he has pledged to spend his remaining months as an MP focused on his part-time medical work, not politics.
Those of a more cynical disposition might suggest this won’t be a change particularly noticed in the House of Commons, with numerous murmurings from both Poulter’s Parliamentary colleagues and his constituency association suggesting he was not the most active or well-known of MPs.
Looking at Poulter’s defection through that lens helps with understanding his reasoning. As well as having the ability to indulge his conscience provided by a second career, one expects that he is an NHS practioner first and politician second. By defecting, he is trying to keep in with his colleagues.
Poulter told Laura Kuenssberg he could no longer look his NHS colleagues and patients in the eye and stay as a Conservative. If he has been spending plenty of time around them, one can imagine the whole Tory MP shtick might get a bit grating. No wonder he has a penchant for writing Guardian op-eds.
Indeed, Poulter has been criticising Tory policy from the comfort of the Grauniad since soon after he was dropped as a Health minister after the 2015 election. Interventions have included complaints that David Cameron had forgotten the disadvantaged and calls for Rishi Sunak to hike pay for striking nurses.
Mandy Rice-Davies rules may well apply to the latter intervention. But for the former, one has to look at how Poulter entered politics. Having heard Cameron talk about “broken Britain” and “the victims of state failure” in 2006, he entered representative politics, boosted by a spot on the ex-leader’s A-List.
The A-List was an eye-catching if unsuccessful idea with which Cameron was associated. It has long been lamented by those in the party who believe it served as a fast-track route for “the pseuds and poseurs of London’s chi-chi set”, in the words of John Hayes, not a big fan of Islington dinner parties.
But as our former Editor has also pointed out, writing off the A-List as a safe space of Guardianistas, carpet-baggers, and fake Tories means tarring such leftie luminaries as Liz Truss, Priti Patel, Esther McVey, Conor Burns, and Suella Braverman with the same brush. Will they defect to Labour too?
Again: each unhappy defector is unhappy in their own way. Poulter has said his Conservative party had a “compassionate view about supporting the more disadvantaged in society”. Today’s Tories have instead become a “nationalist party of the right”. This comes as news to those of us who attended NatCon.
Since Poulter resigned from the BMA in 2012 due to his belief “striking as a doctor” could never be justified, one would suggest his views have evolved somewhat in the last fourteen years. After all, Cameron now claims Sunak as his heir. Poulter may have a very different idea as to what that means.
Strikingly, Poulter’s 2012 decision came a few months before he became Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health Services. He returned to the backbenches in 2015, post-election, returned to work part-time as a doctor, and was soon supporting junior doctor opposition to the Government.
The impression one gets is that Poulter has long since drifted away from the Conservative Party: a token Cameroon in a party that has long since purged that instinct from its bloodstream. Even if Cameron now bats for Sunak, it is a now well-established pattern amongst his former fellow travellers.
The Tories have changed immeasurably in the two decades since Cameron became leader. It’s unsurprising if some of those won over by the husking-hugging now feel a little out of place. But one can’t stop feeling Poulter checked out long ago and is now appeasing the colleagues that he really cares about.
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Author: William Atkinson
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