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The Labour Party is in shock over the leadership’s decision to welcome the defection of the right-wing former Conservative MP Natalie Elphicke.

The day before she literally “crossed the floor” before Prime Minister’s Questions to sit on the opposition benches, Elphicke distributed a leaflet in her Dover constituency attacking Sir Keir Starmer.

On Wednesday, as MPs looked on aghast on both sides, he reached back from the front bench to shake her hand, and later posed for smiling photographs with her.

Elphicke is the second Tory MP in a fortnight to switch to Labour. Both she and Dr Dan Poulter have said that they will stand down at the general election and will not fight for re-election in their old constituencies or, at the time of writing, in another seat.

Labour insists that neither of them has been promised elevation to the House of Lords in an upcoming honours list.

Lee Anderson, another recent defector who shifted rightward from the Conservatives, is currently an independent but has suggested that he intends to stand for Reform UK in his Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, constituency.

The saying goes that “nobody likes a turncoat”. That has never stopped some MPs switching their party allegiances.

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Defecting Tory hits out at Conservatives

Whatever party activists and the voters make of the changes, the switchers take a risk with their own careers. Their political fortunes after the change often sink.

Since 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power, a total of 202 sitting members of parliament have changed their party allegiance.

More than half of these resigned the party whip or had it withdrawn because of personal grievances or disciplinary procedures.

The real number of those who may be classed as genuine “defectors”, active campaigners intent on making an awkward political point, is much smaller.

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In this parliament, a remarkable total of 39 MPs have changed allegiance. Twenty-four had the whip taken away from them, six have been suspended and nine resigned.

Of these only half a dozen are classic defectors. They are Elphicke, Poulter and Anderson plus Kenny MacAskill and Neale Hanvey who crossed the floor from the SNP to Alba, and Christian Wakeford.

Wakeford was the first switcher from the Conservatives to Labour in January 2022, disgusted by partygate.

He has been selected to stand for Labour in his marginal constituency of Bury South. All the indications are that he has a better chance of re-election there this year than under his old blue banner.

Not many defectors go on to enjoy prominent political careers after making the move.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, ideological civil war raged in the Labour Party.

Twenty-eight Labour MPs (and one Conservative) switched to join Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams in the newly formed, centrist, Social Democratic Party.

Only half a dozen of them made it back into parliament at the 1983 General Election.

The SDP split five years later when party leaders Robert Maclennan and Charles Kennedy were technically defectors again, moving to merge with the Liberals in the new Liberal Democrat Party.

Kennedy was scarred by years of vicious harassment by those who chose to remain with David Owen in the rump SDP, which, in turn, disbanded in 1990 after being overtaken by the Monster Raving Loony Party in the Bootle by-election.

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In 2017, centrists were involved in another upheaval in the wake of the EU membership referendum.

Eight Labour MPs and three Conservatives, who all opposed Brexit, resigned their whips. The newly formed Change Party did not prosper.

None of those involved are currently MPs or members of the House of Lords. Two Labour MPs, John Woodcock and Ian Austin, who jumped ship in protest at Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, were subsequently awarded peerages by the Tories.

Elphicke is one of the relatively few female defectors. Two women who left their parties have now circled back to them after dalliances with the Lib Dems.

Emma Nicholson has rejoined the Conservatives and Luciana Berger is campaigning for Sir Keir Starmer.

Read more:
What happens when an MP defects to another party?
Lord Cameron accuses Labour of standing for nothing after taking in Tory MP Natalie Elphicke

Very few turncoats make it back into ministerial office.

Reg Prentice was a Labour cabinet minister in the 1970s, as both education and overseas development secretary. But Trotskyist members of the Militant Tendency forced his deselection as Labour candidate in Newham North East.

He was elected as a Conservative in Daventry in the 1979 election and served under Margaret Thatcher as a health minister.

Keir Starmer and Natalie Elphicke in his parliamentary office in the House of Commons.
Pic: PA
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Keir Starmer and Natalie Elphicke in his parliamentary office in the House of Commons. Pic: PA

Until this parliament the last time when an MP crossed the floor from one main party to the other was three decades ago in the run-up to Tony Blair’s landslide election victory in 1997.

Defections then, from the Conservatives to Labour, are reminiscent of the moves going on now in anticipation of a Tory defeat.

Alan Howarth and Shaun Woodward, two Tory MPs who flipped straight to Labour, were selected to stand in other safe Labour seats in 1997 and went on to become ministers.

Howarth had previously been a minister in the Conservative government. Woodward had been the Conservative party’s director of communications.

Nicholson, Prentice, and Howarth ended up in the House of Lords along with Peter Temple-Morris, who resigned the Conservative whip in sympathy with New Labour and Hugh Dykes who switched to the Liberal Democrats.

Woodward and Peter Thurnham, another Conservative resigner, remain un-ennobled.

There have been two other significant groups of rebels in recent Conservative history, who were suspended or kicked out of the party.

In 1994, a dozen hardcore Eurosceptics, known as Whipless Wonders to their friends or “bastards” waiting for “the men in white coats” to prime minister John Major, had the whip removed for voting against part of Kenneth Clarke’s budget.

The whip was restored a few months later. These temporarily enforced defectors failed to bring down Major and most have since died.

They will be remembered however for lighting the fuse on the anti-EU bomb which subsequently blew the Tory party apart.

In his push to “get Brexit done” prime minister Boris Johnson brutally withdrew the whip from 21 leading Conservative MPs who were opposed his policy.

File pic: PA
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Boris Johnson withdrew the whip from 21 MPs to ‘Get Brexit done’: Pic: PA

Those purged included Rory Stewart, Ken Clarke, David Gauke, Justine Greening, Dominic Grieve, Nicholas Soames and Philip Hammond.

Amber Rudd resigned in protest. The whip was offered back to some of them but only a handful stood for the Commons in 2019. Only two, Greg Hands and Caroline Nokes, plan to run in the next general election. Nicholas Soames, Ed Vaizey and Ken Clarke were awarded peerages.

New defectors are usually rubbished by the party which they are leaving and praised by members of the one they are joining.

That has not been Natalie Elphicke’s experience. Tories are mocking Labour for adopting a right-winger out of sympathy with Labour values.

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Minister ‘shocked’ by defection

Labour MPs are professing bewilderment and annoyance. Some female Labour MPs are further outraged that she attempted to excuse her husband, and predecessor as Dover MP, “naughty Tory” Charlie Elphicke, who was imprisoned for sexual assault. The couple subsequently divorced.

Sir Keir Starmer says he is “delighted” to sign her on. He wants former Tory voters to know that his Labour party is a safe harbour for them, especially those most concerned, like Elphicke, by immigration.

She also has an established interest in housing and will be a consultant to Labour on that, we are told.

Most importantly in her resignation letter 43-year-old Elphicke berated Rishi Sunak as “unelected” and the Conservative party of government as “a byword for incompetence and division”.

Labour is gambling that her move to their party will confirm to all who care which way the political wind is blowing – as many defectors have done in the past.

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Zhenhao Zou: More than 20 new potential victims come forward after ‘prolific’ rapist jailed for assaulting 10 women

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Zhenhao Zou: More than 20 new potential victims come forward after 'prolific' rapist jailed for assaulting 10 women

Another 23 female potential victims have reported that they may have been raped by Zhenhao Zou – the Chinese PhD student detectives believe may be one of the country’s most prolific sex offenders.

The Metropolitan Police launched an international appeal after Zou, 28, was convicted of drugging and raping 10 women following a trial at the Inner London Crown Court last month.

Detectives have not confirmed whether the 23 people who have come forward add to their estimates that more than 50 other women worldwide may have been targeted by the University College London student.

Metropolitan Police commander Kevin Southworth said: “We have victims reaching out to us from different parts of the globe.

“At the moment, the primary places where we believe offending may have occurred at this time appears to be both in England, here in London, and over in China.”

Metropolitan Police commander Kevin Southworth
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Metropolitan Police commander Kevin Southworth

Zou lived in a student flat in Woburn Place, near Russell Square in central London, and later in a flat in the Uncle building in Churchyard Row in Elephant and Castle, south London.

Read more: How a student described as ‘smart and charming’ was unmasked as a prolific sexual predator

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He had also been a student at Queen’s University Belfast, where he studied mechanical engineering from 2017 until 2019. Police say they have not had any reports from Belfast but added they were “open-minded about that”.

“Given how active and prolific Zou appears to have been with his awful offending, there is every prospect that he could have offended anywhere in the world,” Mr Southworth said.

“We wouldn’t want anyone to write off the fact they may have been a victim of his behaviour simply by virtue of the fact that you are from a certain place.

“The bottom line is, if you think you may have been affected by Zhenhao Zou or someone you know may have been, please don’t hold back. Please make contact with us.”

***ONLY USE IF HE IS CONVICTED OF AT LEAST TWO RAPES***It is feared Zou may have carried out dozens more sex crimes. Pic: Met Police
Image:
Pic: Met Police

Zou used hidden or handheld cameras to record his attacks, and kept the footage and often the women’s belongings as souvenirs.

He targeted young, Chinese women, inviting them to his flat for drinks or to study, before drugging and assaulting them.

Zou was convicted of 11 counts of rape, with two of the offences relating to one victim, as well as three counts of voyeurism, 10 counts of possession of an extreme pornographic image, one count of false imprisonment and three counts of possession of a controlled drug with intent to commit a sexual offence, namely butanediol.

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Moment police arrest rapist student

Mr Southworth said: “Of those 10 victims, several were not identified so as we could be sure exactly where in the world they were, but their cases, nevertheless, were sufficient to see convictions at court.

“There were also, at the time, 50 videos that were identified of further potential female victims of Zhenhao Zou’s awful crimes.

“We are still working to identify all of those women in those videos.

“We have now, thankfully, had 23 victim survivors come forward through the appeal that we’ve conducted, some of whom may be identical with some of the females that we saw in those videos, some of whom may even turn out to be from the original indicted cases.”

Mr Southworth added: “Ultimately, now it’s the investigation team’s job to professionally pick our way through those individual pieces of evidence, those individual victims’ stories, to see if we can identify who may have been a victim, when and where, so then we can bring Zou to justice for the full extent of his crimes.”

Mr Southworth said more resources will be put into the investigation, and that detectives are looking to understand “what may have happened without wishing to revisit the trauma, but in a way that enables [the potential victims] to give evidence in the best possible way.”

The Metropolitan Police is appealing to anyone who thinks they may have been targeted by Zou to contact the force either by emailing survivors@met.police.uk, or via the major incident public portal on the force’s website.

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Girl, 11, who went missing after entering River Thames named

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Girl, 11, who went missing after entering River Thames named

An 11-year-old girl who went missing after entering the River Thames has been named as Kaliyah Coa.

An “extensive search” has been carried out after the incident in east London at around 1.30pm on Monday.

Police said the child had been playing during a school inset day and entered the water near Barge House Causeway, North Woolwich.

A recovery mission is now said to be under way to find Kaliyah along the Thames, with the Metropolitan Police carrying out an extensive examination of the area.

Location of Barge House Causeway, North Woolwich, where 11-year-old girl Kaliyah Coa went into the River Thames on 31/03
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Barge House Causeway is a concrete slope in North Woolwich leading into the Thames

Chief Superintendent Dan Card thanked members of the public and emergency teams who responded to “carry out a large-scale search during a highly pressurised and distressing time”.

He also confirmed drone technology and boats were being used to “conduct a thorough search over a wide area”.

He added: “Our specialist officers are supporting Kaliyah’s family through this deeply upsetting time and our thoughts go out to all those impacted by what has happened.”

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“Equally we appreciate this has affected the wider community who have been extremely supportive. You will see extra officers in the area during the coming days.”

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On Monday, Kerry Benadjaoud, a 62-year-old resident from the area, said she heard of the incident from her next-door neighbour, who “was outside doing her garden and there was two little kids running, and they said ‘my friend’s in the water'”.

When she arrived at the scene with a life ring, a man told her he had called the police, “but he said at the time he could see her hands going down”.

Barge House Causeway is a concrete slope that goes directly into the River Thames and is used to transport boats.

Residents pointed out that it appeared to be covered in moss and was slippery.

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Planning reforms to ‘rewire the system’ and get Britain building – all while protecting wildlife

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Planning reforms to 'rewire the system' and get Britain building - all while protecting wildlife

Major developers will only deal with one regulator under planning reforms which ministers say will “rewire the system” to get Britain building – all while protecting the environment. 

A review by former Labour adviser Dan Corry into Britain’s sluggish system of green regulation has concluded that existing environmental regulators should remain in place, while rejecting a “bonfire of regulations”.

But Mr Corry suggested there might be circumstances in which the government look at changing the wildlife and habit rules inherited from the EU, which protect individual species.

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These lie at the centre of the controversy of a £120m bat tunnel – the shed in Aylesbury which protects a rare breed from future high speed trains.

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The government has now explicitly ruled out any such change in this parliament.

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Campaigners have questioned whether the changes go far enough and will make a major difference to the rate and scale of building in the UK.

Speaking to Sky News, Environment Secretary Steve Reed insisted that accepting nine of the recommendations from the Corry review would amount to wholesale reform.

The minister said: “We can get a win-win for economic growth and for nature. And that is why we are moving ahead with proposals such as appointing a lead regulator for major developments so that the developers don’t have to navigate the architecture of multiple regulators.

“They just work for a single regulator who manages all the others on their behalf. Simplifying the online planning portal.

“These are huge changes that will save developers billions of pounds and speed up decisions doing damage to the environment.”

Mr Reed insisted that there would be “no more bat tunnels” built, even though the Corry review suggests that more work needs to be done to look again at the relevant guidance.

It says: “Rapidly reviewing the existing catalogue of compliance guidance, including on protecting bats, will identify opportunities to remove duplication, ambiguity or inconsistency.

“Natural England has already agreed to review and update their advice to Local Planning Authorities on bats to ensure there is clear, proportionate and accessible advice available.”

The review will mean:

• Appointing one lead regulator for every major infrastructure project, like Heathrow expansion

• A review on how nature rules are implemented – but not the rules themselves

• Insisting regulators focus more on government priorities, particularly growth

Economist and former charity leader Mr Corry, who led the review, said it shows that “simply scrapping regulations isn’t the answer”.

“Instead we need modern, streamlined regulation that is easier for everyone to use. While short-term trade-offs may be needed, these reforms will ultimately deliver a win-win for both nature and economic growth in the longer run.”

However, Sam Richards from Britain Remade, a thinktank trying to get Britain growing, said that while the steps are welcome, the number of regulators that report to the environment department would remain the same before and after the review. He questioned whether this would have the impact ministers claimed.

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