The Labour MP for Vauxhall, Kate Hoey, has strongly defended herself after being told of threats of deselection from her local party and criticism from political opponents over her strong support for Brexit.

Several members of her local party have expressed their disapproval of Hoey's support for Brexit to BuzzFeed News, and all the individuals we spoke to said they felt she was likely to be deselected in 2018. The Liberal Democrats' prospective parliamentary candidate told us he has been contacted "every week" by lifelong Labour voters who are now considering switching to the Lib Dems.

However, Hoey has issued a firm rebuke to her critics, saying any opposition to the government's recent Brexit bill on her part would have been deeply hypocritical, and that the Lib Dems "will find that the majority of people, even if they voted Remain, have accepted the result and just want to move on".

Despite her support for issues like fox-hunting and grammar schools and a frosty relationship with the Labour council, Hoey was always well-liked by the local party until recently.



"Kate has always been a bit of an individual, a bit of a maverick; there’s always been rows within the party locally because she takes some very unusual positions ... but up until the referendum, she was relatively well-supported," a senior figure in the local party said.



He added: "I’ve never seen anything like this before, it really is unprecedented. She’s taken a position which is completely at odds with the local membership, but it’s not just that it’s completely at odds, it’s the fact that she’s been rubbing it in their faces."

Hoey has been an MP since winning a by-election in 1989, and was always Eurosceptic. "I have always made my anti-EU views completely clear to my constituents during all the general elections I have fought since being elected 28 years ago," she said. "My election address in 2015 was quite clear that I wanted a referendum and that I was anti the EU."

Her name was floated in early 2016 as a possible Leave campaign chief. It didn't end up happening, but she became a highly publicised figure in the movement, even joining then UKIP leader Nigel Farage on his Brexit flotilla down the Thames.

The stunt was clearly a sore point for Labour members in Vauxhall, which subsequently voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU – it was mentioned, unprompted, by everyone interviewed for this story.

"The issue is that she’s not just been Leave, but aggressively Leave, given her appearances with Nigel Farage," one activist said. "It’s the way she’s conducted herself more than anything else; Kelvin Hopkins and all the other Leave Labour MPs haven’t been on a boat with Farage."

The boat wasn't a one-off; in an interview with The Guardian in January 2016, Hoey defended Farage's party, saying the idea "that anybody in Ukip is a racist is just nonsense" and mentioning "the kind of Guardianista attitude to UKIP which has not done any good up in the northeast or northwest of England".

This may explain why she has been so unapologetic about her views. One Lambeth member complained that at the last local Labour party meeting Hoey attended, "she was asked repeatedly to apologise for her actions ... and she didn’t."