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Former Tory MP Natalie Elphicke’s surprise defection to Labour yesterday is “causing a stir on both sides of the House” in Westminster today, said Sky News.

Keir Starmer extended a warm welcome to the MP for Dover after she crossed the floor, criticising the “broken promises of Rishi Sunak’s tired and chaotic government”. Starmer said he was “delighted” with her defection, two weeks after that of fellow ex-Tory Dan Poulter, telling reporters it showed Labour was “the party of the national interest”.

Less delighted were some of her former colleagues, said the BBC, with Transport Minister Huw Merriman “branding her ‘shameless’ and an ‘opportunist'”. The addition of right-winger Elphicke to their ranks has also “left some Labour MPs feeling upset, let down, and shocked”.

Elphicke attracted criticism in 2020 for her defence of then-husband Charlie, after he was convicted of sexually assaulting two women while serving as a Tory MP for Dover, the constituency his ex-wife now represents. Speaking after the guilty verdict, she dismissed the allegations as “complete nonsense” and suggested her husband had been targeted because he was “attractive, and attracted, to women”. 

One Labour MP who spoke anonymously to Politico said she had cried when she heard that Elphicke had been welcomed into the party. “I thought we had some values that were sacrosanct but we don’t,” she told the website.

The party is “a very broad church”, said former Labour leader Lord Kinnock, but “there are limits” and the membership must be “choosy to a degree” about who it accepts.

“Siri, show me a hollow victory,” said columnist Owen Jones in The Guardian. Elphicke is a “hard-right” Tory who “cut her teeth scaremongering about refugees and migrants”, and her defection merely “sums up Labour’s contempt for progressive voters”.

Despite the criticism, Starmer will “hope to keep the focus on the big picture”, said the BBC. His argument will be that Tory defections can “personify his wider project” of “tempting former Conservative voters to switch to Labour“.