I suspect this will go on every Labour leaflet during the general election campaign
Dan Poulter is also a NHS doctor who has been working on the front lines will have resonance, Sunak is proving to be a very unlucky general as the Observer says
A Tory MP and former health minister has staged a dramatic defection to Labour, saying the Conservatives have become a “nationalist party of the right” that has abandoned compassion and no longer prioritises the NHS.
Dr Dan Poulter, the MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, who works part-time as a mental health doctor in an NHS hospital, announced he was resigning as a Tory MP and would be taking the Labour whip until the next election in an exclusive interview with the Observer.
He said he would not seek re-election to the House of Commons at the next general election. But, writing in the Observer, he says he envisages a role advising the Labour party on its policies on mental health while focusing more on his NHS work.
Poulter said his experiences on more than 20 night shifts over the last year in a severely overstretched accident and emergency department had been “truly life-changing” and persuaded him to defect to the only party he believed was now really committed to investing in improving the NHS.
He said: “I could not go on as part of that. I have to be able to look my NHS colleagues in the eye, my patients in the eye and my constituents in the eye. And I know that the Conservative government has been failing on the thing I care about most, which is the NHS and its patients.”
The Observer understands that discussions between Poulter and senior Labour figures have been going on for many months at the highest levels about the timing and organisation of his likely defection, as well as advisory roles he could play in future in developing the party’s health policies, with the benefit of his firsthand inside knowledge.
The defection has, however, been kept the tightest of secrets, with only half a dozen people in the party knowing it was coming before the Observer broke the news.
A one nation Tory on the left of the party, Poulter has regularly made his disquiet clear about the direction of government policy since David Cameron’s premiership, and it is understood that he has been frustrated by subsequent Tory prime ministers’ lack of interest in his views on NHS reform.
TSE