Labour will 'fall for everything' because they 'stand for nothing', warns David Cameron

David Cameron took a swipe at Labour following the defection of Natalie Elphicke as he said it shows Keir Starmer’s party stood for nothing.

Mocking the Opposition over the shameless political stunt, the former Prime Minister said they “fall for anything”.

“What does this tell us about the party she’s joining? In life, if you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything,” the Foreign Secretary said.

“I thought that’s sort of what yesterday showed, that there isn’t a policy about anything, it’s just been about clearing the decks to try and focus attention on the governing party.”

Answering questions following a speech in London, he added: “When you get close to an election it stops being a referendum on the governing party and it starts being a choice between two parties.

“And I thought yesterday, you wake up and hear about the defection, you think ‘oh no, not another one, how are we going to handle this?’

“By the end of the day it was like ‘that says so much more about Keir Starmer and the Labour Party having a complete lack of a plan than it does about a Prime Minister who is a good man doing a great job at a difficult time’.”

His scathing attack came after Penny Mordaunt compared Sir Keir to a crab and accused him of running “Operation Radish” in a bid to convince voters that Labour looks “red on the outside”.

Ms Mordaunt said of the recent defections from the Tories to Labour: “What it has exposed is a pattern of behaviour from the leader of the Opposition.

"It is a shame we are not due an update to Peter Brookes’ Nature Notes, for the decorator crab is a species which covers its surface area with materials to disguise its true form, usually selecting sedentary creatures and seaweed.

“The leader of the Opposition is the decorator crab of these benches, desperate to show that he’s not really leading the Labour Party at all. He’s channelled Margaret Thatcher, his deputy has praised Boris (Johnson), he’s expelled the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) with great fanfare – a man he was campaigning to be prime minister only moments before.

“His exterior shell is stuck over with St George’s flags, his Gunners season ticket and several programmes from the Last Night of the Proms. What next: a photo op with a bulldog?

"A lecture on how misunderstood Enoch Powell was? Should I ask the whip on duty on the front bench if he has checked in recently with the honourable member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mark Francois)?

“This is Operation Radish: the concerted effort to convince the British public that while the Labour Party might look red on the outside, at its heart it isn’t really at all.

"However, even the defection from our benches of one Labour’s most sternest critics cannot disguise the fact that Operation Radish is not going well.”

Ms Mordaunt said newly-elected Labour mayors had opted to raise issues connected to Israel and Gaza rather than local matters, adding “the politics of the PLP (parliamentary Labour Party) is more the politics of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation)”.

Education Secretary Gillian Keegan also turned her sights on the Tory turncoat, saying she it was a “very odd fit” for the Labour Party considering the Dover and Deal MP’s views on immigration.

Asked if she feared other Tory MPs could follow and defect, Ms Keegan told Times Radio that she hoped most of her other colleagues were “more principled than that”.

She said it was not clear what deal Ms Elphicke had made to cross the floor to Labour and there is “all kinds of speculation” as to why she would do so.

She told LBC of Ms Elphicke: “Her principles and her policies, and her positions, have changed as often as Keir Starmer’s.

“I don’t really know her, she’s much more on the right of the party. I think somebody said they couldn’t find anyone more right-wing than Natalie Elphicke.

“So, I don’t really know her very well but clearly she has had a massive 180 degree change in some of her views miraculously, I guess overnight, and I’m not 100% sure how you can change your views and principles that quickly.”

Labour Party chairwoman Anneliese Dodds said she believes Ms Elphicke is a good fit for Labour and said that “people can change their minds”.

Ms Dodds told BBC Breakfast: “I can see that in her statement that what she set out is absolutely fundamental to the Labour Party … making sure that we have a country that is secure, making sure that we’re delivering on those issues of security, and also making sure we’re delivering on housing as well.

“People can change their minds and, as I said before, Natalie Elphicke is not the first Conservative MP to take this decision.”

She added: “Of course, they are just like the many Conservative voters – and indeed voters of other parties – who have realised that those parties cannot deliver on the issues that they care about, that they need instead to be backing a party that’s got a plan to deal with the cost-of-living crisis, to get our public services back off their knees and get them fit for the future.

“Natalie Elphicke is taking the same decision as so many other former Conservative supporters up and down the country, and I think it’s absolutely right that she’s done so because she’s clearly here putting her constituents in Dover first.”

She also said the Tory deserter has already been made accountable for past comments she made defending her ex husband after he was convicted for sexual assault.

Ms Elphicke’s former husband and predecessor as MP for Dover Charlie Elphicke was convicted in 2020 of sexually assaulting two women and sentenced to two years in prison.

Although she ended the marriage after his conviction, Ms Elphicke supported his unsuccessful appeal, saying Elphicke had been “attractive, and attracted to women” and “an easy target for dirty politics and false allegations”.

Asked about those comments, Ms Dodds told Times Radio: “Of course, this is an incredibly serious issue and there was a judicial process, quite rightly, around that sexual assault.

“There was accountability for Natalie Elphicke in the fact that there was a parliamentary process around this.

“Now, it’s quite right that there was a parliamentary process, as I say Natalie Elphicke has gone through that, and I believe that she has addressed this in Parliament and in public, and rightly so, because this is a very serious subject.”