Party’s ‘lack of due diligence’ on their defector could come back to haunt them

NATALIE ELPHICKE was on a mission. In Sir Robert Buckland’s ministerial office in the House of Commons, Ms Elphicke, the MP for Dover, had a favour to ask of the Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary.

Sources who were at the meeting have gone as far as to call the request “brazen”.

Ms Elphicke had secured the meeting with Sir Robert in order to lobby the cabinet minister over her husband’s forthcoming trial.

At the meeting, she expressed concern over the date of her husband’s trial because it was the first to be heard at the high-profile Southwark Crown Court in the wake of the Covid-19 lockdown. According to sources in the room, Ms Elphicke felt it was unfair her husband’s trial would receive even more scrutiny as a result.

The name of the judge in the case, Lady Justice Whipple, was also raised, leaving some present with the distinct impression that Ms Elphicke wanted the court switched and with that would come a change of judge too.

Ms Elphicke, now 53 and a Labour MP having crossed the floor last week, accepts she met with Sir Robert in the early summer of 2020 before her husband’s trial but she insists the characterisation of the meeting is all wrong.

At the time, Ms Elphicke had been Dover’s MP for six months, having won the seat in Boris Johnson’s December 2019 landslide victory. Charlie Elphicke had preceded his wife as the town’s MP but he had the party whip withdrawn in November 2017 when first accused of sexual offences and then again when charged in July 2019 with three counts of sexual assault against two women.

Ms Elphicke, standing by her husband, filled his shoes as the Tory candidate at the election. She would later leave him in the immediate aftermath of his conviction on July 30 2020, just a few weeks after her meeting with Sir Robert.

“Today’s verdict,” she tweeted, “is one that brings profound sorrow. It ends my 25-year marriage to the only man I have ever loved.”

Mr Elphicke was jailed for two years, with Lady Justice Whipple branding him a “sexual predator” who had used his “success and respectability as a cover”. Her request at the meeting with Sir Robert got short shrift. “She was told in no uncertain terms that it would have been completely inappropriate to speak to the judge about the trial at all,” Sir Robert told The Sunday Times.

Ms Elphicke didn’t stop there, according to the reports. Following Mr Elphicke jailing, she is said to have lobbied again. This time she complained to Sir Mark Spencer, the chief whip, over her husband’s prison conditions.

Two months later in November 2020, Ms Elphicke along with four other senior Tory MPS sent a letter to senior judges on parliamentary headed stationery over a decision being made by Lady Justice Whipple whether to release pre-sentencing character references for Mr Elphicke. Ms Elphicke and two other MPS were suspended from the Commons for a day and ordered to make a public apology.

The standards committee concluded that “such egregious behaviour is corrosive to the rule of law”. Sir Robert’s intervention, which follows Ms Elphicke’s defection, was made, his friends say, because of his concerns about the appropriateness of her behaviour in those months before and after the trial.

Sources close to Sir Robert told The

Telegraph: “It’s really about her judgment. We are expected to believe there is some Damascene conversion to Labour. People are entitled to know about the judgment of this person bearing in mind that she then got MPS to write to the judge about the case at the end of it.”

The source added: “Should there be an investigation? That is a matter for the Labour Party...maybe they should have done due diligence before they accepted her to score a political point.

A Labour Party spokesman said: “Natalie Elphicke totally rejects that characterisation of the meeting. If Robert Buckland had any genuine concerns about the meeting then he should have raised them at the time.”

A spokesman for the MP said the reported second meeting with Sir Mark, after she had broken up with her husband, was “nonsense”.

‘Maybe Labour should have done its due diligence before it accepted her to score a point’

‘If Robert Buckland had a genuine concern, he should have raised them at the time’