More than 100 Conservative MPs have announced they are standing down at the next election. The phrase “rats leaving a sinking ship” springs to mind.

One of those departing the Tory benches is the member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, Dr Dan Poulter, who dominated the airwaves this weekend as he jumped ship to the Labour Party.

On the eve of a set of local elections, Poulter’s attack on his former party and embrace of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party was timed to inflict maximum damage – even though most of the public will never have heard of the former health minister. The elections were already set to be bad news for the beleaguered Conservatives and their increasingly desperate leader, Rishi Sunak.

Given Labour already has a consistent and commanding 20-point polling lead, the defection of Poulter is unlikely to shift polling much, but what does it say about the two major parties in British politics, and the sort of self-declared “centrist” MP that Poulter claims to be?

Primarily, it tells us that Keir Starmer’s “changed Labour Party” is a comfortable home for the sort of Cameronite Tory that Poulter is.

Starmer has been keen to burnish his centrist credentials and those of “my changed Labour Party”, as he describes it. Last year, he claimed the mantle of conservatism, telling i, “the Conservative Party can no longer claim to be conservative”.

When........

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