On the whiteboard in Christian Wakeford’s Westminster office there is a to-do list detailing everything he needs to achieve in the week ahead. Alongside the domestic (laundry) and the aspirational (secure a Westminster Hall debate on pure maths), one entry stands out: “Learn words to Red Flag.”
On 19 January, Wakeford delivered a dramatic shock to Boris Johnson’s government. By walking into prime minister’s questions in a union jack face mask and taking a seat behind Keir Starmer, he became the first Tory MP for 15 years to switch to Labour. It was a moment that blindsided even his closest friends in the Conservative party. To leave the governing party for the opposition was a particularly bold move: the last two Tory defectors, Quentin Davies in 2007 and Shaun Woodward in 1999, both joined Labour when it was in power.
Today, Wakeford insists he is not really swotting up on the Labour party anthem and blames Ben Everitt, the prank-loving Conservative MP for Milton Keynes North, for sneaking into his office. Earlier that morning, Everitt bowled up to Wakeford and gave him a hug bordering on a rugby tackle. It is seven weeks after Wakeford’s defection, and at least some former colleagues are starting to forgive his treachery.
Everitt is also accused of leaving the can of C Bomb pale ale on the desk, a nod to Wakeford’s reputation as one of parliament’s foulest mouths. On the bookshelf, next to a Lego model of Boba Fett from Star Wars, are two bottles of sauvignon blanc scrawled with Boris Johnson’s signature, intended as raffle prizes for constituency party events at which he is now almost certainly unwelcome. By his computer is an unused red Labour mug. It sits on a David Shrigley coaster that reads: “I’m so hungover I wish I was dead.”
It was no secret that Wakeford was unhappy in the Conservative party. Elected as MP for Bury South in 2019, with a majority of just 402, Wakeford was openly critical of Boris Johnson over the “partygate” scandal, and earlier this year revealed he had submitted a letter of no confidence in the prime minister. “How do you defend the indefensible? You can’t!” he tweeted on 12 January.
The 37-year-old already had a reputation for bluntness; last November, he marched up to Owen Paterson and called him a “fucking selfish cunt” after the government instructed its MPs to vote to overhaul the parliamentary standards system in an attempt to save Paterson’s skin (ultimately the government was forced into a U-turn). If he’d resigned the Conservative whip and sat as an independent, few would have been surprised. But for this leave-voting, lockdown-sceptic Tory lifer to join Labour? No one saw that coming. He didn’t seek counsel from anyone in the party he had joined aged 18. His staffers, who included two Tory councillors, were kept in the dark. He didn’t even tell his wife, Alex, until the morning of his defection (her reaction: “Oh shit”).
Many Labour MPs hardly noticed Wakeford during his first two years in parliament and had to Google their new comrade. He had been on the education select committee, but didn’t turn up for meetings half the time, and did not have a reputation for cross-party collegiality. Indeed, after his defection it emerged that he had sent a message to a Tory WhatsApp group calling Labour a “bunch of cunts”. You can see how he earned that can of C Bomb.
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Even as the Guardian’s North of England editor, I had only the vaguest sense of Wakeford. After the 2019 general election, he was among a minority of new Tory MPs who would at least occasionally take my calls, but Covid meant we had never actually met. I interviewed him on the phone in December 2020, and he was open about how hard he was finding the job. He complained that he hardly ever got to see his two-year-old daughter, and there had been protests outside his office after he abstained on the Marcus Rashford-inspired vote on free school meals. “Is there anything good about being an MP?” he mused. “I’ll let you know when Covid finishes.”
A month after his defection, we met for an off-the-record drink in Manchester that turned into five pints and an encounter with two of my friends, musicians who were also his constituents; they were appalled to discover that he didn’t seem to have heard of the Fall, whose belligerent singer, Mark E Smith, lived for much of his life in Bury South. By the end of the evening, I had persuaded him to let me shadow him in parliament. After much to-ing and fro-ing, he eventually sent me screengrabs of his diary and told me to pick a day.
We arrange to meet in Portcullis House, where MPs have their offices, at 9.30am one Tuesday, and he arrives 20 minutes late wearing a decidedly unparliamentary outfit of skinny jeans, bobbly blue jumper and a navy peacoat. He has shaved off the beard he sported on defection day and lost weight. He softly mutters an apology.
We go down the escalator into the tunnel that connects Portcullis House with parliament, and a grey-haired man going up in the other direction clocks him. “Are you OK? Are you surviving?” asks Matthew Offord, the Conservative MP for Hendon. Just about, says Wakeford. “I’m glad about that,” says Offord, with a kind smile.
Not everyone is so warm. Later, in Westminster Hall, Wakeford congratulates Jonathan Gullis, the Tory MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, on the birth of his second child. Gullis – who is one of Johnson’s most loyal defenders, having gone viral during the Omicron wave for jeering, maskless in the Commons – gives him a death stare.
For other former colleagues, Wakeford is now a figure of fun. One whacks him on the back with her order paper as she sweeps past in central lobby, tutting: “For fuck’s sake, Wakeford. Always causing trouble.” It is Alicia Kearns, Conservative MP for Rutland and Melton, who has recently earned the sobriquet of Pork Pie Plotter as the alleged leader of a plan to oust the prime minister. The plot was ultimately aborted, partly because Wakeford’s defection was viewed as so traitorous that some dissenters withdrew their calls for Johnson’s resignation. Wakeford seems disappointed that no one followed him across the floor. “Is it the effect I had hoped for – to galvanise support behind Boris?” he says. “No. But at the same time I still think he would have survived a vote of no confidence.”
Once the north-west coordinator for Johnson’s leadership campaign, Wakeford has come to see the prime minister as a danger to democracy. “He’s never going to leave of his own volition. He’s literally going to be dragged out, screaming,” says Wakeford. He denies owing his election to Johnson: “People didn’t just vote Conservative for Boris. There was also the anti-Corbyn vote, especially in a seat like mine.”
Bury South has the biggest Jewish population of any constituency outside London and the south-east, and many Jews felt the Corbyn administration turned a blind eye to antisemitism. In his maiden speech, Wakeford said a local woman approached him after his victory “with tears running down her face and the simple message: ‘Thanks to you and the Conservatives, we no longer have to leave the country.’” Local politics were complicated further by Labour’s suspension of Ivan Lewis, who had represented the seat since 1997, in a sexual harassment scandal. He ran in 2019 as an independent, winning 1,366 votes despite withdrawing his candidacy at the last minute and urging his former constituents to vote for Wakeford, again because of the antisemitism issue.
Much of Wakeford’s time is spent advocating for the Jewish community. Although he is not Jewish himself, his maternal grandfather was Ukrainian. One of his first engagements, post-defection, was to travel to Kyiv to speak at a symposium ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day about the atrocities committed at Babyn Yar, where 100,000 people were murdered, many of them Jews. He has a Hebrew lesson every Monday – preparation for trips to Israel: “I also thought it would be a nice thing to do, to show I am committed to the community locally.”
His first event of the day is with a group of year 6s on a visit to parliament from King David Orthodox primary school near his constituency. Do you think you’ll regret switching party, asks one child. Wakeford insists he’d do the same again: “The only thing I would try to change would be the effect it has had on friends. These are friends I’ve had for 15, 16 years. They came to my wedding, I went to their weddings, they came to the christening of my daughter. I know I’ve hurt them deeply.”
The friend he is saddest to have lost is Andrew Stephenson, MP for Pendle and minister for HS2. Wakeford, while a county councillor and chair of the Lancashire Conservatives, worked in Stephenson’s constituency office, and Stephenson encouraged him to become an MP. The night before his defection, Wakeford went for dinner at Stephenson’s home along with other MPs from the 2019 intake, including Chris Clarkson, who won the Greater Manchester seat of Heywood and Middleton. Wakeford says Clarkson was appalled at the subsequent betrayal; he called him “Judas” to his face and referred to him as “Christian Wokeford”.
Wakeford stayed until midnight and made no mention of the bomb he was about to drop on them all. Wasn’t there a moment when you thought: I probably should swerve this invitation, I ask. The day before, he had secretly met Keir Starmer, and he had been having clandestine meetings with Chris Elmore, a Labour whip, for months. “It was never meant to be taking place the next day,” he insists. “I explained to colleagues that I was seriously considering leaving the party, but I don’t think they understood that it was leaving to join Labour. I couldn’t tell them that.”
At first, Wakeford says, he was looking for friends across the aisle. But then he and Elmore began meeting weekly in coffee shops around Victoria, bonding over the trials of having small children and their shared love of wrestling. The latter interest came in useful when one of the Tory whips walked into the cafe where they were plotting, and they switched the conversation to WWE.
The final decision was made over Christmas. By the time of Stephenson’s dinner party, “it was a case of when, not if. But I was still thinking there would be weeks, slowly building up to it.” Wakeford says he now regrets attending because it “adds to the sense of betrayal”. Dehenna Davison, MP for Bishop Auckland and a close friend from the 2019 intake, tells me she is willing to forgive Wakeford. “It wasn’t so much the defection that hurt, though I still think he made a huge mistake, which I’ve told him,” she says. “It was the secrecy, and the fact some of us who were close to him were blindsided by it. I still consider him a friend – though our relationship has inevitably changed.”
Wakeford says he was forced to jump sooner than planned when a journalist from the Times called the Labour press office saying they knew a defection was looming, and that they had four names they were about to run. Wakeford found out about the threat at 9.15am on 19 January, and met Elmore to discuss whether to call the paper’s bluff or go for it and “control the narrative”. He chose the latter: “It was a case of very quick pros and cons and, excuse my French but: ‘Holy shit, this is actually real now.’”
Until that day, like many on the Tory benches he had regularly appeared in the chamber without a face covering, but he knew that would not wash on the Labour side, so he reached for the union jack mask. “Quite a lot of people have tried to talk about the symbolism and the patriotism, but it was literally the first one I grabbed from my coat.” It served a dual purpose: “It allowed me to hide my face and the emotion behind it. All I was thinking, sitting there, was: ‘Please don’t throw up, please don’t throw up.’ I was sitting opposite 300 former colleagues trying not to look at most of them, while trying to catch the eye of friends.”
A few weeks before he crossed the floor, Wakeford had called Alan Howarth, a former MP now in the Lords, who defected from the Conservatives to Labour in 1995. Wakeford seemed “very steady, very sensible”, says Howarth, who offered advice on “what he would have to face, so that he could be well prepared, organisationally as well as morally and emotionally”. When Howarth joined Labour, the Tory whips mounted what he calls “a filthy operation to vilify me, and launched rumours about my mental health, my sexuality”.
Within hours of Wakeford’s defection, the Tory whips began spreading rumours about his drinking, as well as other personal matters. The drinking is an interesting one: despite enjoying a pint (or five), he is chair of the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on alcohol harm. He took on the job after talking in parliament about how his older brother died in a drink‑driving accident when three times over the limit. Mark Jones, 44, had been living with Wakeford since his marriage collapsed, and it was Wakeford who got the knock on the door from the police. At the time, Wakeford thought Mark had his drinking under control. “We’d tried to normalise it – to say, ‘If you want to have a drink, drink with us, you don’t have to hide it.’ What we didn’t realise was that there were three, four, five, six other drinks he was having in secret, in his room, in his car, all straight vodka.”
Mark was one of four children Wakeford’s mother had before meeting Barry “Tony” Wakeford, a lecturer in catering at Blackburn College. The pair married and had Christian and his identical twin brother, Julian, a nurse. When the marriage broke down, the twins went to live with Barry, who died of bowel cancer when they were just 11. Wakeford became estranged from his mother shortly after Mark’s death. “It wasn’t the best relationship before, but it got quite toxic,” he says.
He is vague about why he joined the Tories in 2003, saying he liked the idea of meritocracy; that “if you worked hard, you got rewarded”. Most of his views now, if not then, seem solidly New Labour, but there were certain Blair-era policies that put him off, such as the pledge to get 50% of children into university (despite having two degrees, he is a big fan of vocational education).
He got into politics at Nelson & Colne college in Lancashire, where he enjoyed arguing with lefty classmates. “My approach has always been to try to find consensus where you can. Compromise isn’t a dirty word, even though down here in Westminster it has been treated like one. It’s almost like we’ve lost the art of disagreeing,” he says. His main teenage sparring partner, Richard Wyatt, says: “He was a relatively socially liberal Thatcherite at college. I’m from Burnley, and if you think back to that era there was quite a lot of disillusionment with Labour locally.” Cat Smith, the Labour MP for Lancaster and Fleetwood, knew Wakeford at Lancaster University, where he came away with a third in politics, before doing a BSc in chemistry at the Open University and then working in insurance. They would go on nights out together “but we never talked about our respective politics. Like ‘normal’ students, I doubt either of us ever expected to be MPs,” she says.
Even within his new party, Wakeford’s defection was not universally welcomed. Young Labour, the party’s youth wing, tweeted: “Christian Wakeford MP should not be admitted to the Labour Party. He has consistently voted against the interests of working-class people; for the £20 universal credit cut, for the nationality and borders bill and for the police and crime bill.”
Now, Wakeford suggests the Tory whips helped drive him away. After his defection he accused former chief whip Gavin Williamson of threatening to withdraw funding from a new school in Radcliffe, a town in the Bury South constituency where Wakeford lives with his daughter and his wife, when he was education secretary. “It was very much along the lines of: ‘If you’re wanting a favour from the department, and it’s quite a big favour, it’s wise not to vote against the government,’” he says.
He says he raised concerns after he was told to vote against the Dubs amendment of the Brexit bill, which would have allowed unaccompanied child refugees to be reunited with their families in the UK. The whips assured him that the government was against it simply because it belonged in forthcoming immigration legislation. “I guess it is naive to be trusting, but when you’re new you don’t know. But there’s only so many times you can be told, ‘This bill isn’t the right place for that amendment, it will come forward in future legislation.’ And the future legislation comes forward and there’s no amendment.”
He says he feels particularly bad about the Dubs amendment now. Whereas many of his former colleagues are obsessed with controlling immigration, Wakeford is relatively relaxed, and was against the cut to the international aid budget. “For those who think the biggest issue facing us right now is tackling all those small boats, well, surely that’s an argument for more international aid, to improve everyone else’s countries,” he says. “I do think we need a fairer immigration system, based on not where you are from, but what you can contribute to society. But it needs to be fair – that is the main thing.”
His first rebellion came when he voted against Covid regulations in November 2020. When asked which vote with the government he most regrets, he cites the building safety bill on cladding, post-Grenfell. He helped the government defeat an amendment that would have stopped building owners passing on the crippling costs of fixing defects. His abstentions often came on opposition day debates tabled by Labour, which generally have no chance of passing but are designed to embarrass the government – such as the free school meals vote that prompted the protests outside his office, and another opposing a cut to universal credit. It was the latter that prompted the “Labour: bunch of cunts” message. After he defected, he apologised to Angela Rayner, Starmer’s plain-speaking deputy, who told him: “Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ve called you lot worse.”
Wakeford must now win over the Bury South Labour party, which will vote in a few months on whether to allow him to stand for them in the next general election. Starmer has made it clear he thinks he is an electoral asset because of his Tory past, and has not offered to find him a safer seat, as Tony Blair did for Alan Howarth and Shaun Woodward. Wakeford insists most local members have been kind, particularly former Bury North MP James Frith, who welcomed him with a “massive hug”.
Nathan Boroda, a young Labour councillor for Unsworth in Bury South, says constituents are split about Wakeford’s defection, but thinks he will win the so-called trigger ballot. According to Boroda, Wakeford still “has questions to answer, particularly over his voting record”. Do you trust him, I ask. There is a long pause. “I don’t know the answer to be honest,” says Boroda. “I’m still not sure about him.”
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Later on the day I meet Wakeford, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy appears live by video link in the Commons to make an emotive appeal to MPs, but Wakeford is not there. He chooses to keep a prearranged appointment with two contacts from a Greater Manchester university, and takes them to the Strangers’ Bar. After two pints, we go off to give a group of young Jewish European leaders a tour of parliament, and then return to the bar, before attending not just a parliamentary tasting of beers made with British hops, but also a reception from the British cider industry. When I rush off to get my train I confess I feel a bit drunk. “Lightweight,” he says, before heading to a friend’s birthday party.
Earlier I asked him outright if he thought he had a problem with alcohol. “Do I drink? Yeah. Do I think I’m a problem drinker? No,” he says, and the Tory whips’ smear campaign comes to his mind once again. “But to try to use that as a way to discredit me when some of the work I am most proud of is my work on alcohol harm was quite a nasty trick to play.”
Seeing Wakeford hold forth at the bar made me think of something he told the King David schoolchildren earlier in the day as he urged them to consider careers in politics. “It’s an incredibly serious job,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun.”
In the immediate aftermath of his defection, Wakeford seemed lonely and miserable. Watching him today, I can see he is also an MP who loves the boys’ club atmosphere in parliament, the banter, the drinking, the lobbyists competing for his ear. At one point in the afternoon, we attended a reception for Mondelez International, which owns the Cadbury brand. I assumed he had some special interest in regulating the sugar industry, but all we do is sample a chocolate fountain and have a laugh with some of his lobbyist friends.
I like Wakeford, but there’s a certain naivety to him, which makes me think no one in his new party is giving him advice: was it wise to go drinking with a journalist when your enemies want to suggest you are a problem drinker? Shouldn’t he have been in the debating chamber for Zelenskiy’s historic address instead of the Strangers’ Bar? And what 37-year-old needs to remind himself each week to do his washing?
Will he be the last of Johnson’s MPs to join the Labour benches? Maybe not, he says. “Do I think anyone else will cross? Possibly, and if they are thinking about it, they are probably looking at what is going on with me quite closely, and the warm reception I’ve received. My advice to them would be: give me a shout.”
