The Elphicke affair has made Starmer look incompetent and unprincipled

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. 

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