Change UK’s Anna Soubry has described as bizarre a suggestion by the party’s leader that people could vote tactically for the Liberal Democrats in the EU parliament elections, after the party failed to win any seats.
The new pro-EU party, formed in April by breakaway Labour and Tory MPs, polled 3.6% on Sunday night with 10 of 12 UK regions counted, placing the party just ahead of Ukip. Change UK did not return any MEPs.
Soubry, who is the party’s Brexit spokesperson, insisted it had been an “extremely good” result for Change UK, which won more than 600,000 votes five weeks after it registered as a party.
On the Wednesday evening before polls opened in the UK, Heidi Allen, the party’s interim leader, said she had threatened to quit in a row over whether to advise people to vote tactically for the Lib Dems outside London and the south-east.
Soubry, speaking to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on Monday, said: “I think it is rather bizarre for an interim leader, on the eve of poll, to tell people essentially not to vote for their party.”
Change UK initially rejected any suggestion it could work with the Lib Dems – with the MP Chris Leslie saying the party came “with baggage”. But the new party’s MPs appeared to warm to the idea of working with the Lib Dems as polling day approached.
Allen suggested on Sunday that Change UK could merge with the Lib Dems, while fellow MP Chuka Umunna said he could see the two parties entering into an electoral pact and agreeing not to stand candidates against each other.
Ahead of the EU elections, the Lib Dem leader, Vince Cable, said he regretted that his party and Change UK were not able to fight a “common campaign”, but said his view was “not reciprocated”.
“No deal was ever offered. That is an absolute fact,” Soubry said on Monday.
She added: “You do not stand candidates and then say to people: ‘we’re going through a complete farce, please don’t vote for them’. So let’s engage now in big grownup politics.”
Soubry, asked if her party would ever do a pact with the Lib Dems, said: “These things may well emerge but, for goodness sake, this is a long way down the line. You’ve got to have your own policies first of all before you can go into any form of negotiations with any other party to do pacts.”
She added: “I absolutely believe that British politics is broken. I left the Conservative party – I believe it had left me – joined with others from the Labour party, absolutely determined to change British politics ... We need to do politics differently. I believe there are millions of people in this country who aren’t represented by any party and so we’ve come along.”
