The defection of Natalie Elphicke to Labour was, no doubt about it, a political coup de theatre. What wasn’t immediately clear, but is becoming clearer now the curtain is up and the players are stumbling around the footlights yelping and tripping over bits of the set, is what sort of theatre: farce.
Elphicke looks like the gift nobody wants to find under their Christmas tree
Natalie Elphicke was delivered to Keir Starmer, that sobersides opponent of what he calls ‘gimmicks’, in the manner of a gift-wrapped present. He and his team, in the least gimmicky way imaginable, timed the opening of this present deliberately to ambush the Prime Minister ahead of PMQs. More fool him. He opened the present and, boom: Looney Tunes-style, he ended up with eyes blinking white in a soot-blackened face, hair frizzed up as if he’d put his fingers in the socket.
Even before he started to pull on the ribbon, might there not have been reasons for caution? Was it grounds for hesitation, for instance, that Elphicke has views that make Nigel Farage look like a timid centrist? Was it grounds for hesitation that she was shooed in as an MP by her local Conservative association, inheriting her candidacy uncontested when her sex-offender husband stepped down to spend more time with his lawyers? Or was the giveaway that the parcel was delivered by someone looking suspiciously like Wile E Coyote?
Natalie Elphicke has already been found to have breached the parliamentary code of conduct in attempting to influence a judge (which was known when she jumped ship and Sir Keir welcomed her aboard his own) when she wrote to a senior presiding judge on parliamentary notepaper lobbying for helpful restrictions on the evidence in her husband’s trial. Now two Sunday newspapers report that she did more than that. The then-Justice Secretary, Sir Robert Buckland, says that on the eve of her husband’s trial she lobbied him in person with an apparent view to changing the venue of the hearing and the judge presiding. The meeting had been arranged by the Tory chief whip, it’s reported, and had been preceded by an assurance that she had no intention of discussing Charlie Elphicke’s case – an assurance which at best we can say was not honoured and at worst we can say was a big fat hairy lie.
Elphicke, I am duty bound to say, denies that any such conversation took place: ‘totally rejects that characterisation of the meeting’; ‘nonsense’. I place that in context only by noting that a) she has form for exactly this sort of thing (see above), that b) knowing what I know of Sunday newspapers and libel law it would be quite the flyer for the Mail on Sunday and Sunday Times to take were they not pretty confident in their sources on this one and that c) it would be a very odd thing for a former Lord Chancellor to have invented.
It is, obviously, to Sir Robert’s credit that – assuming we can trust his version of events, and I do so assume – he immediately called a close to the conversation and made clear he would do nothing to intervene in her husband’s criminal trial. He’s reported to have told aides her lobbying was a constitutional outrage: ‘She was told in no uncertain terms it would have been completely inappropriate to speak to the judge about the trial at all.’
But if Sir Robert (day job: Conservative MP for Swindon South) really does have so Olympian a regard to the constitutional proprieties, you have to wonder why he waited until Elphicke became a Labour MP to speak up on the matter. Was it not, his righteous ‘outrage’ thus activated, open to him at the time – indeed mandated by the dignity of his office – to start an inquiry into the matter, report it to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards or, I dunno, just leak it to the Mail on Sunday? After all, that’s what happened with admirable promptness the other time she tried to use her privilege as an MP improperly to influence the proceedings of the criminal justice system. The wheels of justice may grind fine, but in this case they grind exceeding slow.
So Sir Keir Starmer ends up, yes, with soot all over his face and his hair sticking up. He looks like an unprincipled opportunist but, worse, he looks like an incompetent unprincipled opportunist. The party from which the wretched Elphicke defected not a week after she was leafleting voters to tell them to vote for Rishi Sunak doesn’t come out of this unblackened either. And as for Natalie Elphicke, she looks like the gift nobody wants to find under their Christmas tree. How in God’s name is such a person not only an MP, but an MP any party leader would affect to feel proud of having in his or her ranks?
To switch metaphors, it’s sometimes said that it’s better to have someone inside the tent peeing out than outside the tent peeing in. Natalie Elphicke stands half in and half out of both tents, peeing randomly all over the place. Bucket of confetti please. Send in the clowns.
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