Tory membership was right in doubting the Tory commitment of the defectors
Parliament operates too much like a club, with its own codes of behaviour and weird customs designed to put off outsiders, say Westminster’s critics. There is something in that. The place at its worst, in its flummery, is a 19th century reimagining of a bogus version of the 17th and 18th centuries.
But one benefit of the club-like atmosphere of the voting lobbies, committee structure and tearooms, is that friendships form among MPs, both within parties and across party boundaries, encouraging civility and understanding. The exceptions are some of the Corbynistas who proclaim they could never be friends with a Tory. Imagine being so sour as to think that politics totally trumps human warmth and comradeship with your fellow citizens.
Happily, other MPs take a different view, disagreeing on policy while being able to converse in a friendly fashion over a glass of wine without hitting their opponents with a hardback copy of Das Kapital or Wealth of Nations. They respect their colleagues, or some of them.
A laudable instinct for friendship – and an understanding that it’s only politics, after all – helps explain the multiple expressions of regret made by Tory MPs about the departure from the Tory party of three of their colleagues. Anna Soubry, Sarah Wollaston and Heidi Allen announced today that they will sit with the “Tiggers” in The Independent Group established by seven MPs who broke away from Labour on Monday. TIG has not even been established as a formal party and the latest YouGov poll for The Times puts I[ on 14% of the vote.
In the wake of the Tory resignations, several Tory MPs tweeted or said that they hope the three can rejoin the Conservatives at some point. I wonder if Tory members will take such a relaxed view about forgiving and forgetting referendum rerun defectors after Brexit. I doubt it.
Friendship is splendid but it can be blinding. There is brute politics to consider and Tory MPs saying they are “sad” need to pull themselves together sharpish. This parliament is disintegrating and an election looks ever more likely. The government barely has a majority, for anything. But the Tories have a perfectly respectable argument to make against the defectors and must make it. What the defectors just did had nothing to do with protesting anti-semitism. They have made a fundamentally dishonest play based on their mono-maniacal obsession with a referendum rerun.
The three Tory MPs say they were forced out by people who accused them of plotting a new party. But they were plotting a new party, weren’t they?
The Tory membership always gets a terrible press and has a poor reputation at Westminster. The members are all 87, or something, it is said, as though it is illegal to be old. But no, research suggests the average age is only a couple of years older than that of Labour members, somewhere south of 60.
Now one of the main charges made by the defectors is that the Tory party has been taken over by Ukippers. Membership is up, CCHQ claims, but there is little evidence of a large scale invasion. Even at its height UKIP never got close to being a mass party.
Non-hysterical MPs I speak to report that their associations are pretty pragmatic and down to earth. Brexit is broadly popular among grassroots Tories and they don’t like people they helped get elected trying to stop it. Who knew? It’s almost as though there was some kind of referendum and the British voted to leave the EU. Almost three years ago.
None of the Tories who left today have been deselected by their local associations. But there was widespread concern among the party membership that a small band of MPs were not committed Tories and that they were working to form an anti-Brexit party. For all the abuse the Tory membership receive, they were right about these three MPs weren’t they? They were working to form a Remain/rejoin party. They have helped form it behind the scenes. And they have just resigned from the Tory party and joined it. The Tory members who doubted their commitment to the party which got them elected to the Commons were dead right.