Rishi Sunak’s good week in politics just came to an end. Buoyed by a successful defence spending announcement and the passage of the Rwanda Bill, there had been rumours that the run-up to Thursday’s local elections would see the announcement of the general election date. But in a shock move, Tory backbencher Dan Poulter this afternoon announced that he is defecting to Labour, citing the depleted state of the health service. The MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich previously said he was standing down at the next election but will now sit for the Labour party until parliament is dissolved.
In an interview with the BBC, the former health minister told Laura Kuenssberg that he could no longer look his NHS colleagues and patients in the eye and stay on as a Conservative. Poulter, who works part time as a doctor, suggested that the Tories were no longer focused on public services, saying: ‘The party I was elected into valued public services… it had a compassionate view about supporting the more disadvantaged in society. I think the Conservative party today is in a very different place.’ He added he had ‘no animus’ towards Rishi Sunak but that the country needed a general election as soon as possible, adding that Labour and Sir Keir Starmer could be trusted to run the NHS and the country. In further comments to the Observer, Poulter attacked the Tories for becoming a ‘nationalist party of the right’.
The news broke shortly after 5 p.m this afternoon, with Downing Street left scrambling to supply a response. Discussions between Poulter and senior Labour figures are believed to have been going on for many months at the highest levels about the timing and organisation of his likely defection. The Observer reports that he is likely to take up a future advisory role in developing the party’s health policies, using the ‘benefit of his firsthand inside knowledge’. This would fit with the now-established pattern of Cameron-era Tories defecting to advise Keir Starmer from Nick Boles and Tom Fletcher to Jim O’Neill and Andrew Cooper. The Conservative majority in parliament has meanwhile almost halved from 80 seats in 2019 to just 41 in 2024.
Poulter is the third Tory MP to defect this parliament and the second to do so to Labour after Christian Wakeford in 2022. Today’s switch might have lacked the theatre of Lee Anderson’s press conference or Wakeford’s physical crossing of the floor of the House. But it is damaging nonetheless at a time when the Conservatives are struggling to convince themselves that the next election is still competitive. Labour will be delighted at pulling off this audacious coup just five days before the country next heads to the polls, with shadow health secretary Wes Streeting hailing the news as proof of ‘the damage that 14 years of Conservative government have done to our NHS’.
Given the high state of voter dissatisfaction with Britain’s public services, the Opposition is keen to talk about falling standards within the NHS as much as possible ahead of polling day on Thursday. Poulter’s defection gives them ample reason to do exactly that.
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