Quentin Davies’s letter of defection
Quentin Davies writes a damning letter to his party leader in defecting from the Conservatives to Labour. I can see why he’s leaving them, but am somewhat surprised that he has chosen to support Labour.
Principally, it seems, it was David Cameron’s lack of support for Europe which first caused him to rethink his position. But not entirely: “I tried to put this ugly incident out of my mind and carry on.”
Much of the rest of Mr Davies’s discomfort comes from Mr Cameron’s single-minded focus on winning power:
You have displayed to the full both the vacuity and the cynicism of your favourite slogan “change to win”.
This leads, he details, to policy announcements without any policy, hypocrisy, and confusion. But if anyone has a record of changing to win it’s Labour, as they moved from vanilla Labour to New Labour. They, too, have been accused of all these things. The only difference is that Labour has always been obliged to do something about it since they’re the ones in government (because they changed to win so much they even convinced a huge proportion of the voting public).
I’m curious to see how Mr Davies gets on on the other side of the House. I was about to say “…in his new home” but I wonder if he’ll really feel at home there.
Still, perhaps that’s just carping for the sake of it. What the MP for Grantham and Stamford has done is a brave thing; he’ll lose a lot of friends, and he knows it. And full marks to the new prime minister who has apparently “charmed Mr Davies during five meetings”. Labour’s newest member says
I am looking forward to joining another party with which I have found increasingly I am naturally in agreement and which has just acquired a leader I have always greatly admired, who I believe is entirely straightforward, and who has a towering record, and a clear vision for the future of our country which I fully share.
And he has this to say to his former leader:
Although you have many positive qualities you have three, superficiality, unreliability and an apparent lack of any clear convictions, which in my view ought to exclude you from the position of national leadership to which you aspire and which it is the presumed purpose of the Conservative party to achieve.
Youch.
