Deputy leader casts scorn on Tim Farron’s suggestion that some Labour MPs are seeking to jump ship following Corbyn’s election as leader

Leaving the Labour party to defect to the Liberal Democrats would be like swapping the Beatles for a Bananarama tribute band, according to Tom Watson.



The remarks from the new Labour deputy leader followed a suggestion by the Liberal Democrat leader, Tim Farron, that a number of Labour MPs had contacted him, distraught after Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide win.

“I don’t think anybody is seriously saying there’s defections ... That would be like leaving the Beatles and joining a Bananarama tribute band,” said Watson, speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday. “I don’t see any Labour MPs, or serious Labour MPs, who are going to defect to go to Tim Farron’s party.”

Farron, also speaking on the Today programme, said Watson was flattering himself if he thought he could ever have been a member of the Beatles, though he added that there was nothing wrong with Bananarama.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tim Farron said there was nothing wrong with Bananarama. Photograph: Crump/Barham/Daily Mail /REX

The Lib Dem leader said it was not his job to be a “home wrecker” for Labour MPs, but to “provide a home for liberals and social democrats wherever they may currently be”. He refused to go into more detail about the conversations he had had, saying it would be “indecent”.

Farron first hinted he’d had conversations with Labour MPs thinking of defecting in an interview with the Evening Standard last week, saying he was being called on to play the role of agony aunt. Speaking to the BBC’s Andrew Marr show on Sunday, Farron confirmed that more than two MPs had been in contact.

Despite Farron’s comments, peer and former Lib Dem MP Lady Tonge told the Sunday Times that she was considering defecting to Labour because Corbyn’s honest politics were “a breath of fresh air”, claiming that lots of Lib Dems were thinking of doing the same.



Tonge, a former MP for Richmond Park, is still a Lib Dem party member but left the parliamentary group in 2012 after refusing to apologise for saying Israel “is not going to be there for ever”.

Watson, who was elected as deputy Labour leader on the same day Corbyn became leader, urged the party’s MPs making critical comments to journalists about Corbyn’s leadership to “please respect the mandate he was given – 60% of our members voted for him”.



He added: “I’m not sure that some of our colleagues in the parliamentary Labour party are prepared to respect the mandate that he’s been given and I just ask that they show a little bit of respect and tolerance of him as a new leader.”

Watson told the Today programme: “If you look at the history of the Labour party, we’re about 115 years old and for about a century there have been different strands of political thought within the Labour party, from social democracy to command economy socialism to Christian socialism.

“In all of those years other than the last decade we found a way of moderating them, of having a creative process for having political outcomes that serve voters and we’re in that process again.”