No deal was done with Natalie Elphicke to secure her defection to the Labour Party, Shadow Paymaster General Jonathan Ashworth has insisted.
Asked if she has been promised a peerage, he told Camilla Tominey on GB News: "There is no deal, no deal has been done. No promises have been made."
This follows Elphicke's defection to the party after claiming the Tories had become "a byword for incompetence and division" under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
When pressed by Camilla on whether there was an offer, Ashworth claimed that Elphicke's decision "reveals the decay and disintegration of the Tory Government before our eyes".
Ashworth told GB News: "Her move is as what is happening across the country with people who have been Conservative all their lives, or perhaps shifted their vote from Labour to Conservative in more recent years, are shifting now to the Labour Party led by Keir Starmer, because they've had enough of 14 years of failure.
"They want to turn the page on 14 years of failure, and they know that another five years of the conservatives, with their £46billion black hole in their plans, would mean tax rises for pensioners or the NHS, or a borrowing bonanza putting mortgages up again."
Defending the new Labour MP, Ashworth claimed: "Natalie Elphicke was disillusioned with the failure to help young people get onto the housing ladder, disillusioned with the Tory failure to bring order to the borders and stop the boats.
"She looked at Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, she sees that's the change this country needs and she moved over as thousands and thousands of Conservatives across the country are doing."
Camilla pressed Ashworth again on whether Elphicke has been offered a peerage, and if we will expect to see "Baroness Elphicke of Dover come 2025".
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Ashworth squirmed: "No, we don't make promises. We don't do deals."
He added: "I am not a very tribal kind of guy. Let me say this: I've got friends, I've got relations, I've got neighbours who are Conservatives. They're not my enemy.
"They're my neighbours, my friends and relations. And I want those people, as many of them are, to shift their vote to Labour at the next General Election."
When pressed again for a "guarantee" that Elphicke was not offered a deal to defect, Ashworth claimed: "I'm not responsible for Lords appointments, I don't have that power. If I did, I'd be putting you in the Lords, Camilla. But I don't have that power, sadly so. But I can guarantee you that no deal has been done."
Ashworth was also asked how the public could trust Keir Starmer when he has consistently voted against stricter immigration measures.
He said: "He voted against hopeless measures that wouldn't work. And have they worked? What's the latest figures?
"Eight or nine thousand have crossed, hundreds every day. Have all these things we voted against worked? No. And we said they wouldn't work. That's why we voted against him."
He continued: "We said this incompetent Government wouldn’t be able to get a grip of it, that’s why we've talked about a Border Security Command bringing together the police the intelligence service.
"It's like why we've said we’ll use terrorist-style laws to go after the smugglers, like control orders, stop and search, search warrants at premises. These things aren't being used at the moment. We've got to get tough with these smuggling gangs. That's exactly how we would approach this."
