On Monday I blogged that I found the decision of seven Labour MPs to leave the party more sad than hopeful:
Rather than the launch of a new movement, I see seven individuals who have succumbed to the hard left's perennial tactic of making life so unpleasant for those who oppose them that they eventually walk away from the fight.
Things seemed rather different this morning when three Conservative MPs joined the in The Independent Group.
Isabel Hardman tweeted:
Heidi Allen kicks off the defection press conference with jokes and a v upbeat tone. Couldn’t be more different to the sorrowful atmosphere from the ex-Labour seven on Monday.
Back in the 1980s only one Conservative MP crossed the floor. That was Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler, who sat for North West Norfolk.
Apparently he was known to his colleagues as Dogger Bank Trawler because he was "as wet as the North Sea".
He lost his seat at the 1983 general election, though he came only 3147 votes behind the winning Tories. He lost by a much greater distance four years later.
The last time I saw him he was selling Liberal Democrat ties from a stall at a spring conference in Nottingham not long after merger.
Looking him up today, I found that Brocklebank-Fowler is still with us and that he joined the Labour Party in 1996.
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