A former Labour MP has said he would have told Natalie Elphicke the party was full had he received her application to join.
Stephen Pound described some of Elphicke’s comments as ‘downright offensive’ and said the decision to admit her ‘sits very badly with me.’
Speaking on GB News Stephen Pound said: “The Lord loves a sinner who repented. But in all honesty, if I'd been the chief whip at the time and we’d got this application from Natalie Elphicke I would have said, we're full and there's a waiting list.
“I think this doesn't go down very well at all. Nobody could say I was on the left of the Labour Party, quite the contrary, but this sits very badly with me.
|When you think that some of her comments were just downright offensive and I think in all honesty, if she was disgusted with the Tory party, as she clearly and demonstrably is, then why not just sit as an independent?
“Anneliese Dodds was playing a good hand and, in her place, I would have done the same thing: concentrating on the policy differences. But in all honesty, how can someone with those views undergo such a Damascene conversion?
“Talk about U turns on the road to Damascus - more than a Syrian taxi driver. It’s an absolutely extraordinary situation and really, it does not sit well with me. I don't think it sits well with most people in the Labour party.
“But having said that, what else could we have done? We could hardly have said ‘no, we don't want you’ when we're trying to appeal to a broad swathe of the British people. Sometimes I think that swathe is perhaps a little bit too broad.
“I think the Dan Poulter case is much more interesting. He’s a practicing GP in the health service, who actually for a long time has been critical of Tory policy on the health service. So I think that's much more reasonable, you can understand the sort of the organic process that's been.
“But Natalie Elphicke, to flip overnight in this way, if the rest of the country is going to go the same way there's only going to be three Tory MPs left.
“There's a Labour candidate, Mike Tapp, who's already been adopted as our candidate in Dover and Deal and he was there yesterday, and actually just stressing the fact that there's no way that he’s going to stand down for her. And to be fair, Natalie Elphicke’s not asking that.
She’s not going to go to the House of Lords: That would simply be impossible. That would be the straw that broke the camel's back.
“A quango? I don't know. I mean, she's actually not an untalented person and there is clearly a role for her in the future. She's not going to go and sit in the garden shed for the rest of her life, she's going to be doing something, but I don't think that that's going to be through the grace and favour of the Labour Party.”
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