Strange bedfellows
Yesterday two more former Conservative MPs jumped ship and defected to Reform UK.
One was Maria Caulfield, a former health minister whose very brief tenure in office is one of the more obscure footnotes in history. Appointed by outgoing prime minister Boris Johnson on July 7, 2022, following a flood of ministerial resignations, she was removed two months later by incoming PM Liz Truss and returned to the backbenches from whence she came.
The other defector was Henry Smith, who I had never heard of until yesterday. The pair of them followed Danny Kruger MP, who announced his defection on Monday. Before that it was Nadine Dorries, and other former Tory MPs who have switched sides include Sir Jake Berry, Dame Andrea Jenkyns and Lee Anderson. (Have I missed anyone?)
By common consent, Kruger is the most interesting and intelligent member of that group. His is arguably the first ‘serious’ defection but he’s not well known to the public so I’m not sure how much impact it will have. The question is whether it will encourage more sitting Tory MPs to defect. His appeal to Reform is that he doesn’t come with a lot of baggage, having only been elected to Parliament in 2019, and he has come across well opposing the Assisted Dying Bill, albeit from a rather fundamentalist Christian position. (But at least he has principles, which makes a change.)
As I’ve said before, I’m not a fan of MPs defecting, especially when they’ve been elected to represent a particular party (they should at least resign and stand again under their new colours), but some of what Kruger said on Monday made sense, notably his comment (about the Conservatives) that ‘we have had a year of stasis and drift and the sham unity that comes from not doing anything bold or difficult or controversial’.
There is some truth in this. Unfortunately the Tories are split on so many issues Kemi Badenoch dare not commit herself to much at this stage in case it splits the party even further. We can see this with the generational tobacco ban. Badenoch is against it but she can’t force her MPs to oppose it because she knows that some of the Tobacco and Vape Bill’s most ardent supporters are Conservative MPs like Bob Blackman, chairman of the 1922 Committee and previously chair of the APPG on Smoking and Health. As a result, it’s difficult to know what the Conservatives stand for on this and many other issues, which is a problem.
As a lifelong Conservative voter (albeit never a party member or activist) I have struggled in recent times to get my head around the fact that in government the Tories not only embraced aspects of the nanny state but actively drove it forward. Plain packaging and the sugar tax were both introduced under the Tories. Prior to that the legislation for the tobacco display ban had been passed by the previous Labour government but it had yet to be enacted. The ban could have been repealed by the new coalition government but David Cameron (who opposed the policy in opposition) chose not to, although, to be fair, the Lib Dems may have had a say in that.
The question is, would a Reform UK government be any better? For example, I have yet to hear Nigel Farage announce that Reform would repeal a generational tobacco ban. I appreciate there is a degree of politics involved, and Farage may not want to show his hand just yet, especially as the Tobacco and Vapes Bill is still proceeding through parliament, but it was disappointing that Reform declined to put an MP forward to discuss the issue at the fringe meeting Forest hosted at the recent party conference.
Furthermore, it’s not enough to accept the status quo and go no further. If a Reform government is to achieve anything, it has to roll back the frontiers of the nanny state in the same way that Mrs Thatcher rolled back the frontiers of the socialist state that successive governments – Labour and Conservative – had introduced in the decades following the Second World War.
The question is, how committed is Reform going to be when it comes to rolling back the nanny state? Take these recent defections from the Conservative Party, a party that in recent times became part of the problem. In April 2024, before she lost her seat at the election, Maria Caulfield voted FOR Rishi Sunak’s Tobacco and Vapes Bill, including the generational ban. Likewise Henry Smith who also voted aye to Sunak’s bill.
On the other hand, before they lost their seats, Sir Jake Berry and Dame Andrea Jenkyns both voted against Sunak’s bill, as did Danny Kruger who also voted against Labour’s Tobacco and Vape Bills, so it’s a mixed bag.
Further investigation however reveals that Berry voted FOR plain packaging, as did Nadine Dorries and Henry Smith. Oh, to be a fly on the wall when the Reform team discuss their response to future nanny state policies.
