Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Conservative MP Mark Logan said on Thursday he will support Labour at the election, piling pressure on UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who is struggling with an exodus of nearly a quarter of his parliamentary party.
In a statement, Logan, who had represented Bolton North East since 2019, said he had left the Tory party and would not seek re-election, adding: “Labour is back.”
He said he had submitted an application to join Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party, which is more than 20 percentage points ahead of the Tories in opinion polls.
“We need renewed enthusiasm and optimism in both tone and in policy, and I believe that we are already seeing this through Keir Starmer and his team,” he added.
Logan’s defection takes the total number of Tory MPs who have announced they are standing down to 78, and the number of defections to Labour over the past five weeks to three, overtaking the exodus that preceded Labour’s 1997 landslide victory. The Tory party had 345 MPs by the time parliament was officially dissolved on Thursday — 20 down on than the 365 it took at the last election in 2019.
Several high-profile exits came last week, including housing secretary Michael Gove and former cabinet ministers Dame Andrea Leadsom, Sir John Redwood and Greg Clark.
Since late April, Dan Poulter, MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, and Natalie Elphicke, MP for Dover, have “crossed the floor”, sparking a backlash from the left of the Labour party over who has been allowed to join under Starmer’s leadership.
The Labour leader has come under fire this week for a “purge” of high-profile left-wing figures from his party, including the candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green Faiza Shaheen, and over accusations he has obstructed veteran MP Diane Abbott from running on July 4.
Earlier in the day, chancellor Jeremy Hunt conceded that his Surrey seat was on a “knife edge”, with the Liberal Democrat challengers having a number of cabinet ministers in their sights.
The Conservatives are battling to retain several seats in their traditional heartlands, known as the “blue wall”, including Hunt’s Godalming and Ash constituency.
“We have had private polling where we were just ahead and private polling where we were just behind,” he told the Evening Standard. “Genuinely impossible to call.”