Another day, another defection. This time it’s Mark Logan, now former Conservative MP for Bolton North East, who has announced he will be backing Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party at the general election. It’s yet another blow for poor Rishi Sunak who is already facing an exodus of 78 MPs while the Tories remain 20 points behind Starmer’s army in the polls.
Steerpike would point out that Logan’s excruciatingly small majority of, er, just 378 in 2019 made his one of the most marginal seats in the country — and he would be unlikely to win it back even if he did remain a true blue. On his reasons for switching sides, the Bolton MP told the BBC today that he firmly believes Starmer’s lefty lot had been on a ‘journey’ and now offered ‘centrist politics’, adding that the Labour party has the ability to ‘bring back optimism into British life’. And, in a reference to band D:Ream who unwittingly drowned out the Prime Minister’s snap election announcement after protestors blasted ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ into Downing Street, the newly-converted Starmerite said:
When I look back to my teenage years, in 1997 when Labour came to the fore at the time and we obviously heard the song Things Can Only Get Better, I feel that we’re at that point again in British politics and British history… For my constituents and for the country, it’s right that we get some stability back into the UK, we get optimism, we get new and fresh ideas… It’s more about not the push factor of Conservatives, but the pull factor of Keir Starmer, the new cabinet that would come in, the fresh faces the fresh ideas.
Safe to say Starmer’s ‘change’ agenda has worked its magic on Logan. While it’s not the first time the ex-MP has hit out at the Tories — he quit his ministerial aide job in 2022 in protest at Boris Johnson’s leadership and pushed back against his party’s position on a ceasefire in Gaza earlier this year — Mr S wonders if there are other motivating factors at play. Starmer’s party has already chosen its candidate for Bolton North East, although Logan told the BBC today that he ‘wouldn’t rule out coming back into public life in the future’. How curious. Will this former MP find his Labour endorsement opens other doors for him? Watch this space…
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