Change UK leader: ‘We could form single party with Lib Dems’

Change UK could form a single centrist party with the Liberal Democrats, the party’s leader Heidi Allen has said.

Change UK leader Heidi Allen. Picture: PA/PA Wire

Her comments come after her fellow Change UK MP Chuka Umunna said they should form a pact not to stand against each other’s candidates in the next general election.

Ms Allen, who left the Conservatives to join other breakaway Tory and Labour MPs, said she would go “one step further” than that.

“I would like us to be in the same vehicle,” she told BBC Radio 5 Live.

Asked if she meant the same party, Ms Allen replied: “Yeah, probably, I don’t know. This partisan thing completely passes me by and whenever I look across at Europe, they seem to do pretty well with coalitions. I don’t know what the format will be, but will we be singing from the same hymn sheet? I would hope as a collective, let’s call us a collective, somewhere in the middle with other like-minded colleagues.

“I don’t think it’s sensible to be too prescriptive at the moment.”

Ms Allen said that to be a “real insurgent force”, the alliance needs to be “brand new” rather than a larger Liberal Democrat Party.

Last week, she admitted she had threatened to quit in an internal row over tactical voting to maximise the pro-Remain challenge to Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.