News / Politics
Debbonaire: ‘I knew from November that I was going to lose’
Former Bristol West MP Thangam Debbonaire said that she received a text from Keir Starmer after losing her seat in which he commiserated with her but also spelled her name wrong.
Debbonaire, who in her 20s changed her surname by deed poll from Singh to the surname of a relative from her first marriage, could yet be elevated to the House of Lords by the new prime minister, perhaps alongside former Bristol mayor Marvin Rees.
But so far she is keeping quiet about her future while looking back at some of the reasons why she has only returned to the House of Commons to hand in her security pass and will not be taking up an expected cabinet position as culture minister.
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She was asked in an interview on Channel Four News whether she lost in Bristol Central because the Labour leadership was too prosaic, because of the scrapping of Labour’s green investment pledge or because of the party’s failure to come up with a more robust stance towards Israel.
Debbonaire answered: “Well, it was all of those. And it was the fact that the Green Party knew how to capitalise on them.”
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Debbonaire told Cathy Newman that the Greens “used the same playbook” as Reform and some winning independent candidates.
“It’s a danger if you get in the habit as a campaigning political party of saying things that are actually not true but sound good.”
She added: “I actually did vote for a ceasefire, not once but twice, and our motion – our amendment to the motion in February – that got through unanimously for various, all sorts of reasons, but it did, one of them being we knew how to handle parliament.
“Now, that wasn’t what the Green Party sent out. And it was difficult.
“Because I kind of knew from November that I was going to lose the seat because I thought, this is what they’ll use and if my party doesn’t communicate what we’ve done, what we’re saying, then obviously voters don’t know it, they don’t follow every tiny twist and turn of politics, they’re not all on Twitter.
“And by the time people have got a belief in their heads, and you’re on the doorstep saying, ‘no, I voted for it twice’, they don’t believe you anymore.”
Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer won 10,000 more votes than Thangam Debbonaire at the general election to become MP for Bristol Central – photo: Rob Browne
The former professional cellist did not accuse the Green Party of lying during the general election campaign in Bristol Central but she came close.
“On the leaflets that they put out, they didn’t say that I had voted against a ceasefire, but people interpreted that from them saying, ‘she failed to vote for a ceasefire motion’.
“True, I failed to vote for one because it didn’t mention the hostages.
“It’s easy to craft a narrative that goes, ‘your MP didn’t vote for a ceasefire’, if your own party hasn’t said we’ve voted twice for a ceasefire, and publicly, and other colleagues suffered terribly, worse than me.”
Main photo: Channel 4
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