After Natalie Elphicke’s defection to Labour, who’s next? Enoch Powell?

It was deja vu at PMQs this week. It’s said that as people die, their life repeats itself in front of their eyes. The same is true of governments.

Once again the same prurient blob from the SNP asked the same question about the same topic (if you’d mercifully forgotten, this was the subject of vape companies sponsoring football teams, which I’m sure comes up endlessly on the doorsteps in Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh). We also had the same leading piece of smarm from Sir Keir Starmer: news of another Tory defection to Labour’s merry band.

The Lady Macbeth of the South Coast, Natalie Elphicke had decided to take a break from previous exploits – such as recounting the story of her divorce to The Sun and defending her sex offender ex-husband – to change parties. This met with some bemusement in Labour circles. “Well, at least one woman from Kent got a meeting!” tweeted Canterbury MP Rosie Duffield, who is still awaiting her apology following the Cass report.

The shock was still greater on the blue benches. Jonathan Gullis gaped as Elphicke took her seat behind the Leader of the Opposition. Quite apart from the MP for Dover’s “colourful” past life, Truss-backing Ms Elphicke was hardly known for being on the cuddly wet wing of the Tory Party.

Who will be next – Suella Braverman? Desmond Swayne? The ghost of Enoch Powell? After the success of Lib Dem infiltrator Liz Truss surely it’s now time for Tory sleeper agent Richard Burgon to come in from the cold.

Still, if Sir Keir is going to have his Big Top, sorry big tent, government then necessarily that will include some people who make General Franco look like Roy Jenkins.

More deja vu as the PM brought up “that” no money left letter from 2010 as he contrasted Tory and Labour records in government. Determined to go one lamer, Sir Keir brought up the Prime Minister’s failure to put on a seatbelt in January 2023. It was pretty desperate stuff. You don’t even get shots this cheap in a Wetherspoons.

Sir Keir added a new annoying verbal tic (which for a man who has so many already seems a little excessive) as he kept on referring to “this changed Labour Party”. The PM picked up on this and used it to ask about the subject of the Labour party’s eterno-psychosis: Israel. More deja vu.

Starmer declined to distance himself from Sadiq Khan’s claim that there should be “equivalence” between condemning Hamas and Benjamin Netanyahu. Nice “changed Labour party” you’ve got there.

The spar – one of the least impressive of recent memory, which is saying something given that the quality of Rishi v Keir is usually measured in the lower Kelvins anyway – ended with another repetition by the PM that everything was going to plan and that the Conservatives were getting on with government. Never mind deja vu; this was fast entering the realms of pure fantasy.

This was compounded by the arrival of a figure I had literally forgotten even existed. The practically mythical leader of the Lib Dems, Sir Ed Davey, popped up to ask a question about social care.

Proceedings were rounded off with a representative of the very maddest party of them all. Unlike her new colleague in Leeds, Caroline Lucas didn’t scream “Allahu Akbar!” but instead talked about turds in the waterways. There lies the future of the Green movement: between the devil and the deep poo sea.

It was an appropriate end in its own way: from deja vu to dangerous poo. As with all deaths, after the past few years flashing before our eyes we switched to pure delirium. What comes next is invariably the death rattle.