Hello and welcome the special edition of Coffee Hour 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. Yes, the big question is, is it better to be a faithful or a traitor in British politics? And I think the answer to that, at least if we look at history, is it depends whether you're defecting to a major party or a minor party. I think if you look at the on balance of the MPs who defected from a major party to a minor party,

most of them ended up not doing as well as if they had stayed in the major party.

So you look at the SDP, which of course Danny knows a great deal about.

And between 1981 and 1983, I think 26 sitting

MPs defected to the SDP in just a two-year period. And only five of them were returned at the

1983 election. 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 returned at the general election.

And even if you look at the MPs who defected to UKIP, there were three of them, Bob Spink,

Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless, all of them ended up having pretty short political careers after that.

So that doesn't look good.

But if you defect from a major party to another major party, then quite often you'll see that the receiving party will push you up the ministerial ranks.

You could see that in the 1970s with

Reg Prentice, who was a Labour cabinet minister, who then became a Thatcher government minister.

You look at Sean Woodward, who was a conservative frontbencher, who then ended up in the Labor

Cabinet. And there other examples, Winston Churchill, back in the day when the Liberal Party was a major party, flitting between the Conservatives and the Liberals and back to the Conservatives, he always seemed to get rewarded with very senior ministerial roles. There's a fantastic story, I think, of him being appointed as Chancellor by Baldwin, and he thought he was going to be Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and no, no, it was the Exchequer. That's absolutely right. Danny, I mean, you were a long-time member of the STP and then joined the Conservatives. I mean, what goes through the mind when you're making that jump? And could you maybe speak to the different political culture in both parties because it seems that everyone's got quite distinct sort of feel to them in different parties? I just wondered if you could speak to that, maybe. First of all, it wasn't quite traditionally, in my case, a defection because the SDP had collapsed.

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