Zac Goldsmith’s turncoat moment could usher in a Labour government

Things can only get better: Goldsmith, a Tory peer, has hinted about defecting to work with Keir Starmer. Could this be 1997 all over again, asks John Rentoul

Goldsmith, in his interview with BBC News’s ‘Hardtalk’, urged Starmer to show ‘the kind of commitment that we saw when Boris Johnson was the leader’ (PA)

You do not need Google Translate to understand the many meanings of Zac Goldsmith’s warm words about the Labour Party. “If” he heard a “real commitment” from Labour “to protect and restore the natural world” on its way to net zero, he said, “I’d be very tempted to throw my weight behind that party and support them in any way I could”.

There is the surface meaning: green Conservative peer puts pressure on Keir Starmer to hold the line on environmentalism. Goldsmith’s climate-change activism is focused on wildlife rather than what he called “carbon, taxation and regulation”, but he wants greater green efforts rather than the “proportionate and pragmatic” approach favoured by the prime minister.

The first subtext, not far from the surface, is the Boris Johnson Revenge Factory. Goldsmith is a friend and ally of the former prime minister and of the former prime minister’s wife, and he is part of an operation to prove that the Conservative Party made a terrible mistake getting rid of its one and only true leader.

Indeed, the message was hardly hidden at all, as Goldsmith, in his interview with BBC News’s Hardtalk, urged Starmer to show “the kind of commitment that we saw when Boris Johnson was the leader”.

The second subtext was not much more subtle. The threat to “throw my weight behind” Labour is obviously a way of damaging the Tories as a payback for the Betrayal of Boris. But there is more to it than that. It is a potential turncoat moment that echoes the great floor-crossings of the early Blair era.

Goldsmith, Johnson and Starmer all know that defections are the hard currency of politics. When Alan Howarth, the former education minister, became the first MP to defect directly from the Conservatives to Labour in October 1995, it was an earthquake that presaged the landslide a year and a half later.

Most people remember Shaun Woodward’s more vivid defection, but that came only in 1999, after two years of the Blair government. He was more prominent than Howarth, having been Tory director of communications under John Major and later serving in Gordon Brown’s cabinet as Northern Ireland secretary, but it was Howarth’s defection that foretold the 1997 election – and his own return to junior ministerial office.

Starmer has already welcomed one defector, Christian Wakeford, who crossed the floor last year, protesting that Johnson had failed to uphold “the highest standards of integrity and probity in public life”. He hasn’t re-ratted, as Winston Churchill put it, now that Rishi Sunak, who shares his view of Johnson’s morality, has taken over.

But it is surprising that there hasn’t been another defection since – despite persistent rumours in the Westminster village – given the incentive structure facing any Tory MP with a majority below 15,000. And Starmer, like Blair before him, has tried to remove ideological obstacles to Tory MPs who are motivated at least partly by self-interest.

Goldsmith knows that he is pressing the government’s weak spot. He is not an MP any more, but he is a recent minister attending cabinet and he has green virtue on his side. His pro-Labour talk is adding to a tilting of the playing field in Starmer’s favour. Claire Perry O’Neill, another ex-MP and former green Tory minister, backed Starmer earlier this year. Tory donors are restless, and Blair-era donors are returning to the Labour fold.

Sunak’s attempt to present himself as Mr Reasonable is undermined at every turn by a party determined to seem ever more unreasonable. Dominic Grieve, a reasonable, pro-EU former Tory, told The Independent yesterday that Lee Anderson, the Tory deputy chair, risked “making the Tories the even nastier party”.

Grieve is one of the authors featured in a book edited by David Gauke, The Case for the Centre Right, which will be published next month and which will advertise precisely the kind of Conservative who might be tempted to defect. None of the authors is a current MP, and many of them have already left the Conservative Party – but there are still plenty of serving Tory MPs who think like them.

I guess that at least one MP will defect during this party conference season. Zac Goldsmith is merely holding open the door for them.