Coffee House Shots: does British politics reward traitors or faithfuls?
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The Spectator
4.3 • 826 Ratings
🗓️ 24 January 2026
⏱️ 22 minutes
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Summary
With the Conservatives on watch for further defectors, academic Richard Johnson and Conservative peer Danny Finkelstein join James Heale to discuss whether British politics rewards traitors or faithfuls. Richard points out that often personal success is dependent on whether the party goes on to be a major or minor player in British politics; Winston Churchill and Shaun Woodward fared better, while Shirley Williams and Mark Reckless had less success.
Danny – whose political career began with the SDP in the 1980s – also takes us through his personal experience and the challenges of defecting, from ideology and demography to the perception of betrayal. How fundamental is the shift taking place in British politics?
Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
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| 0:34.1 | Hello and welcome the special edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm James Heel. I'm joined to devote by the Queen Mary academic Richard Johnson and the Times leader writer Danny Finkelstein. Recently, there's been a huge amount of defecions in British politics. We had recently, Robert Jemrick, most prominently. Richard, you've written a piece for The Telegraph talking about the history of political defactions and the kind of spirit of treachery that runs deep in our nation's political and government culture? |
| 0:54.7 | Yes, the big question is, is it better to be a faithful or a traitor in British politics? |
| 0:59.2 | And I think the answer to that, at least if we look at history, is it depends whether you're |
| 1:03.9 | defecting to a major party or a minor party. I think if you look at the on balance of the MPs |
| 1:10.0 | who defected from a major party to a minor party, |
| 1:13.0 | most of them ended up not doing as well as if they had stayed in the major party. |
| 1:18.2 | So you look at the SDP, which of course Danny knows a great deal about. |
| 1:23.3 | And between 1981 and 1983, I think 26 sitting MPs defected to the SDP in just a two-year period. |
| 1:31.9 | And only five of them were returned at the 1983 election. |
| 1:36.2 | And if you look more recently at something like Change UK in 2019, 11 MPs defected from the Labour and Conservative Party to change UK. None of them were |
| 1:46.6 | returned at the general election. And even if you look at the MPs who defected to UKIP, there were three of |
| 1:52.0 | them, Bob Spink, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless, all of them ended up having pretty short political |
| 1:59.1 | careers after that. So that doesn't look good. But if you |
| 2:04.4 | defect from a major party to another major party, then quite often you'll see that the receiving |
| 2:10.5 | party will push you up the ministerial ranks. You could see that in the 1970s with Reg Prentice, |
| 2:17.2 | who was a Labour cabinet minister, |
... |
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