Why Starmer was right to welcome Elphicke

In the early 1960s an academic called Philip Converse started publishing the results of research that overturned many standard assumptions. His findings would be rejected by many and argued about for decades. People didn’t want what he discovered to be correct. But in the end the truth was inescapable. Philip Converse was right. And because Converse was right, I think Sir Keir Starmer was right.

Last week the Labour leader gained a new recruit to his party — the Conservative MP Natalie Elphicke. The decision to grant her the whip has been controversial. Almost every day since, there has been a new story suggesting that what looked like a triumph was in fact an error. But I think the Labour leader was spot on.

There absolutely is a case against accepting Elphicke into the Labour Party. And the decision cannot have been an easy one. It was made more difficult because wide consultation is impossible in politics if you want to keep something secret.

• My daughter Natalie Elphicke defended her husband as a good Catholic

Elphicke was not just a Tory MP, she was a right-wing one. On immigration, on relations with the European Union, on Marcus Rashford’s school meals campaign, she has been combative and antagonised many Labour MPs. She doesn’t appear to regret these positions or the rhetoric she used. Are there really no boundaries to Labour? Can members just think any old thing?

She was bound to make her new colleagues uncomfortable. And there is a danger that the decision might make voters uncomfortable too. Accepting her into the party might make the Labour leader seem cynical and might deepen the sense that he doesn’t really care what he or anyone else stands for. After all, he expelled Jeremy Corbyn from the party within a year or so of arguing that Corbyn was a friend and ought to be prime minister, and he has suspended Diane Abbott. He prefers Elphicke to them?

The Labour leader could reassure himself that few people know who Elphicke is, and that most people will be unaware of her defection. But too much emphasis on this would render accepting her into the party pointless. Which is hardly a compensation.

Then there is a still more serious objection to granting Elphicke the Labour whip. One that I’m sure will have weighed most heavily on Starmer. When Elphicke’s husband Charlie was charged and convicted of serious sexual offences, she initially stood by him, lobbying on his behalf in an inappropriate way. Yes, she later divorced him, but is this someone you really want in the party?

So, as I say, this cannot have been an easy decision. Perhaps Starmer might even have preferred it if Elphicke had never applied to join. But she did. And I think in the circumstances he made the right call.

Let me start with Charlie Elphicke. During the long period in which he was under police investigation and suspended from the Conservative whip, he made a habit of cornering people and protesting his innocence. He would say that he didn’t have a clue what the allegations against him even were. He would bemoan the injustice. I know because he did it to me. Often.

Approaching the table in parliament where I would be working, he would sit down, uninvited, and launch into a long speech about his situation. Then a few days later he would do it again. I barely knew him, knew nothing of the allegations, and I didn’t have any idea what to make of what he was saying. It was quite oppressive.

• The Times view on Natalie Elphicke’s defection: Strange Bedfellows

Later it became obvious that almost everything he had said to me — that he had sought me out, unbidden, to say — had been a lie. He had been so brazen, so insistent on his innocence, that the revelation of his flat untruths was shocking to me, even though he was a stranger. And I reproached myself for the mere act of listening to him politely and without commitment.

So I can only imagine how emotionally complicated it must have been to be married to him, and to come to terms with his grotesque behaviour, his betrayal and his repeated deceptions. I’ve never been politically all that sympathetic to Natalie Elphicke, nor have I ever met her, but I am slow to judge her reaction to what were his offences and his lies. I imagine this was the conclusion that Starmer reached too.

Which leaves us with the questions about her politics. And leaves us with Philip Converse.

Converse was a political scientist at the University of Michigan who made the study of political attitudes his life’s work, and became celebrated and controversial for his discovery that most people don’t have them.

What his work suggested — proved really, even though many didn’t wish to accept it — is that when you ask people their opinion on a political issue more than once, you often get a completely different answer each time you ask. Most people aren’t consistent, aren’t ideological, aren’t all that well informed about public affairs and haven’t given much thought to policy matters.

If you press people for a response to a polling question on an issue, they won’t want to tell you that they don’t know or don’t care. Even though that is probably the truth. So they give the pollster some sort of answer. Converse used to call the opinions that people express in these circumstances, “non-attitudes”.

People with a strong party identification, ten years into a political career for instance, are different from this, of course. They have actual attitudes that remain consistent over time, even if they are often formed by a desire to fit in with other party members.

So to them it seems baffling that someone can express a load of right-wing opinions one day and join Labour the next. Non-attitudes are an alien thing to political professionals. But most voters have them.

If Starmer had rejected Elphicke’s application he would not merely have missed out on an opportunity to embarrass Rishi Sunak and demoralise the Conservatives, he would be announcing that there is an ideological test that you have to pass in order to be permitted to support Labour.

Yet, as Converse showed, this is a test most voters would not, in fact, pass. Political professionals might have seen her rejection as an act of principle. But voters who at one point may, say, have supported Brexit, people who worry about immigration in a poorly focused way, those who keep changing their minds about Marcus Rashford, might have seen Labour’s rejection of Elphicke as a rejection of them.

To most people in politics Elphicke seems bizarre. How can someone be a Tory one day and Labour the next? How can they have a mishmash of right-wing views and then claim to be part of the left? Starmer’s wisdom is to appreciate that it’s the ideologically consistent people who are the oddity. Most people are like Natalie Elphicke.

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