Tory MP's defection is perfect start for Brown

As Blair steps down and Brown assumes his mantle, there can be no denying that Brown has had a perfect start with an almost immediate Tory defection to the Labour Party.

Quentin Davies, a pro-European appalled by Mr Cameron's Eurosceptic line, accused the Tories of standing for nothing and being driven by public relations. He heaped praise on the "towering record" of Mr Brown, who personally wooed him to Labour at a series of private meetings in the past two months.

The 63-year-old former shadow cabinet minister was accused of "treachery" by former Tory colleagues, who challenged him to cause a by-election in his Grantham and Stamford constituency, where he has a majority of 7,445.

Brown is either a wonderful stage manager or simply one of the luckiest men ever to become British Prime Minister. For the defection, coming on the day Brown assumes power, gives the impression that Labour is the party of the future and Cameron's Tories are a pale imitation.

Labour's surprise coup on the eve of Mr Brown's premiership gives the incoming prime minister him some valuable ammunition to fire at the Conservative leader. In an open letter to Mr Cameron, Mr Davies, a former shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland, said that, after more than 30 years in the party, he could no longer carry on "living a lie". He accused Mr Cameron of breaking a promise that he would not pull Tory MEPs out of the European People's Party, the main centre-right group in the European Parliament.

"Under your leadership, the Party appears to me to have ceased collectively to believe in anything, or to stand for anything," he said. "It has no bedrock. It exists on shifting sands. A sense of mission has been replaced by a PR agenda."

Mr Davies described the Tory leader's foreign policy as a shambles, accused him of being opportunist for demanding an inquiry into the Iraq war and criticised his "green air miles" scheme to combat global warming as "complete nonsense".

It's a devastating indictment, and strikes at the heart of what many see as the fatal weakness of Cameron's new Conservative Party and it's lurch into the middle ground. It's very hard not to write it all off as so much pandering to the crowds, it's certainly almost impossible to believe that the Tory Party agree with the direction that Cameron is taking them in.

And the timing simply couldn't be more harmful, coming on the day of a Brown succession that Cameron has, at least publicly, always said that he was looking forward to.

However, this day will now be remembered for Davies' savage attack on the leader of his old party, the most devastating of which was surely:

"Although you have many positive qualities you have three - superficiality, unreliability and an apparent lack of any clear convictions, which in my view ought to exclude you from the position of national leadership to which you aspire."

Even Sir Geoffrey Howe's attack on Thatcher, which eventually led to her downfall, wasn't anywhere near as savage as that.

So no matter what else happens today, Brown can surely count his first day in office as a good one. And Cameron can peruse on the fact that the wily old Scotsman, who he has been waiting with baited breath to replace Blair, isn't going to be the pushover that Cameron had hoped for.

Brown's either very clever or very lucky. Neither bodes well for Cameron.

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Tags: Brown, first day in office, Quentin Davies, defection, Labour, Conservative