That’s the speculation over at Iain Dale’s Diary.
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The good money is on John Bercow
Who? đ
Chris Pattern to be Foreign Secretary
Iain Dale has been writing posts for weeks claiming that one or more Lib Dem MPs were about to defect to the Tories. Yesterday in respect of the defection of Quentin Davies he wrote, “Of course it is upsetting. Political parties are tribes, and tribes don’t like it when one of their own kicks them in the face”. Kind of hard to feel much sympathy in the circumstances.
However, even when people are defecting to us I always feel rather uneasy. Of course there are circumstances where the refrain “I haven’t left my party; my party has left me” are true, as with the Labour Party in the early eighties, but it is a lot less common for someone to have genuinely re-thought their political views and to decide that they are no longer in the right party. Far more commonly, in local politics at least, a defector has been thwarted in one way or another: they may have had an obsession about a particular issue; they may not have got on a committee they wanted to be on; they may not have got on with their colleagues: whatever, the chances are that they will dress their defection up as a matter of principle – which it rarely is.
Iain Dale is also offering speculation about Shirley Williams being spotted in Gordon Brown’s Commons office… well beyond the realms of possibility?