Cornish pasty rebel George Eustice, MP for Camborne and Redruth, a former Hague press secretary and defector from Ukip, is part of the team.
Plus they had plenty of ammunition to attack Ukip: the Tory-Ukip defector Douglas Carswell in 2012 wrote a book advocating the wholesale privatisation of the NHS, and Nuttall posted a letter on his website praising the coalition for bringing "a whiff of privatisation" to the health service.
Instead, Farage looks set to recruit Mark Reckless as his new policy director, the Tory defector who failed to hold his Rochester and Strood seat on 8 May, an idea that throws up a pleasing range of headlines although possibly less in the way of strategic ideas of interest to voters.
It is unclear whether Ahmed is related to Manaf Tlass the most high-profile defector so far.
Times columnist Matthew Parris described Clacton, where last October Tory defector Douglas Carswell became Ukip's first MP, as "Britain on crutches".
(Irritatingly for Merck the licenser was Vertex, a biotech firm set up by Joshua Boger, a former senior director of basic chemistry at Merck and the firm's most sorely missed defector).
Douglas Carswell, another Tory defector, won the Clacton by-election on October 9th; the party is on 16% in the latest YouGov poll (up from 3% in the 2010 election); and Nigel Farage, its blokeish leader, has been offered a place in one of the televised leaders' debates before next year's general election.
Indeed, one defector says that the half-fed army has been put on manure duty ordered to clean out latrines and slurry pits and spread muck on the spring fields.
Lee Kum-ryong, a defector who works for Free North Korea Radio, says that when he visited the offices of North Korean businessmen in Beijing after Mr Jang's fall, he was met only by Mr Kim's goons, come to "arrest" them; the staff had already fled.
Mr Aponte may not be the last high-level defector in 2012.
With the help of a prominent defector from the Conservative opposition, the votes of two independent MPs and the casting ballot of the speaker, the minority Liberal government of Paul Martin, Canada's prime minister, defeated (by 153-152) a motion of no-confidence.
