On 4 January, Keir Starmer set out his New Year’s resolutions with a speech, in which he promised “change” no fewer than 20 times.
His specific focus was corruption. “I will restore standards in public life with a total crackdown on cronyism,” he stated. But while committing to restore standards, Starmer also promised to “clean up politics” in every way. Because politics should not be “a pastime for people who enjoy the feeling of power”, but “a higher calling”. He insisted: “Only Labour will drag our politics back to service.”
The location he chose to deliver this speech, in the marginal seat of Filton and Bradley Stoke, was no coincidence. The local MP, Jack Lopresti, has faced bullying allegations, and although he still rejects them, one incident resulted in him apologising to a former employee after a Tory party investigation.
The Labour Party was picking a battleground: the ethics territory loosely known as “parliamentary standards”. Renewing the ethical quality of politicians, Starmer asserted, was essential to the broader Labour mission to “lead Britain towards national renewal”.
In January, picking a fight on parliamentary standards with the Tory party looked like shooting fish in a barrel. Here was a party that had put Boris Johnson in No 10 – and then deposed him only after “Paterson, Pincher and Partygate”. Starmer hoped to position Labour as the party which would bring back ethics in British public life. He even hired the Civil Service’s former ethics chief Sue Gray to oversee his transition into government.
Wednesday’s decision to welcome Natalie Elphicke on to the Labour benches drives a coach and horse through this ethical strategy. To anyone who cares about issues of sexual harassment and violence in Westminster, it feels like a betrayal.
Others have already written about the gulf between Natalie Elphicke’s right-wing politics and the natural position of the Labour Party. When she defected to Labour, she attacked Rishi Sunak for leaving “the centre ground” of British politics, which bemused those of us who were once campaigners for genuine centrism in the Tory party. Most of my friends in this category gave up on the Tories precisely because the party now belonged to people like Natalie Elphicke.
Instead, my focus is Natalie Elphicke’s track record on sexual violence. It may bemuse some that feminist writers like myself are lining up to criticise a woman because of the consequences of her husband’s wrongdoing. Only Charlie Elphicke is responsible for his crimes: the three counts of sexual assault for which he has been convicted. But few women have done as much as Natalie Elphicke to attack, proactively, not only the women who accused her husband of rape and sexual assault, but also the entire group of complainants who sought in 2017 to expose the culture of sexual misconduct in Westminster.
Elphicke told The Sun in 2019 that “Charlie is charming, wealthy, charismatic and successful – attractive, and attracted to, women. All things that in today’s climate made him an easy target for dirty politics and false allegations.”
She made these comments after his conviction, not before. And she was appealing to readers whom she hoped would understand a natural reluctance to take women seriously “in today’s climate” – especially ambitious, younger women around politicians. How natural to assume that an older, “successful” man would be the “target”?
This was not Natalie Elphicke’s only involvement in the campaign to paint the #MeToo movement as a witchhunt. (At one point, she complained that a victim should have complained to her, as the perpetrator’s wife, instead of the police.) But it happens to be the one which received most focus during her defection, and it is therefore the one for which she has today, four years late, issued an apology.
Anneliese Dodds, chair of the Labour Party, appears to have directly misrepresented the truth on this matter, when appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme. Challenged to defend Natalie Elphicke’s interview with The Sun, Dodds suggested that Elphicke had already served a suspension to atone for her attacks on victims.
“This was an incredibly serious case… which had a judicial process around it and a parliamentary process, and Natalie Elphicke [was] quite rightly subject to it.” Asked how she would reassure female colleagues, she reiterated that Elphicke had already undergone and “rightly was covered by that parliamentary process”.
Except that it wasn’t quite true. Natalie Elphicke has only been subject to one parliamentary process stemming from her husband’s trial, and it covered an entirely different matter.
Elphicke had tried to hide the fact that she and several allies had sent character references to the judge sentencing her husband, offering arguments in mitigation. (Sending the character references was entirely legal. The attempt to hide this fact from the press was the more problematic issue. Several of the MPs had used official House of Commons notepaper for the letters in which they lobbied the judge, while later insisting that these missives constituted private correspondence.) It had nothing to do with the attacks on her husband’s victims, for which she has never been disciplined.
There was no mention of this in today’s belated apology, when Natalie Elphicke said: “It was right that he was prosecuted and I’m sorry for the comments that I made about his victims.” It is hard not to believe the apology was rushed out after Dodds’s Radio 4 interview demonstrated to the Labour leadership how difficult Elphicke’s record would be to defend.
Perhaps Dodds’s own slip up about Elphicke’s record was an honest mistake. But when, prior to this apology, the chair of the Labour Party is tripping over herself so desperately to defend a defector’s attacks on rape victims, something has gone very wrong. For those of us who watched the Tory party struggle to defend a litany of Tory sexpests and enablers, it feels like Groundhog Day. We were used to senior Tories embarrassing themselves by defending Mr and Mrs Elphicke; now the roles are reversed.
For this is how you spot the drip-drip corruption of ethical standards in a political party. It’s in the hastily re-drawn definitions of what parliamentary standards processes should and can do. It’s in the self-loathing of once-principled senior officials, following up bad political decisions with bad political distortions. It’s in the smell of shame.
Keir Starmer had a chance to make his Labour Party a movement which cleaned up Westminster; the party which extended its whip only to MPs who passed Starmer’s own bar for a “higher calling”. He and the most senior members of his team have blown that mission.