Starmer’s day of dithering that left party in turmoil
Labour leader faces crisis after crisis as MPS accused of making anti-semitic comments on Gaza war
SIR KEIR STARMER had to be “dragged kicking and screaming” into disowning Azhar Ali after he took five hours to publicly act over fresh anti-semitic comments by the prospective MP, a prominent Labour member has said.
Having spent all of Sunday defending the candidate for Rochdale, who had suggested Israel allowed the Hamas terrorist attack to happen to justify an invasion of Gaza, the Labour leader received a call at his north London home just before 2.30pm on Monday with more bad news.
His staff had been alerted to a recording of Mr Ali railing against “some of the people in the media from certain Jewish quarters” and accusing Israel of a “land grab”. It was clear that Sir Keir had made a dreadful mistake in giving the order that Labour should keep campaigning for Mr Ali over the weekend. Faced with the new information, “there was no other choice” but to withdraw Labour’s support for him, said a party insider.
Yet it took until 7.30pm before the party announced such a decision.
Labour MPS are entitled to ask why it took five hours to cut Mr Ali adrift – a delay that has only magnified the sense of chaos engulfing Sir Keir after he was forced to suspend a second candidate last night.
Graham Jones, who had been expected to stand as the Labour candidate in Hyndburn in Lancashire in the general election, was suspended after it emerged he had called for Britons who volunteer to fight for the Israeli Defense Forces to be “locked up”. His comments were made in the same meeting as those made by Mr Ali.
Allies of the Labour leader claimed his decision to suspend Mr Ali on Monday had been swift and decisive, but critics said he should have acted sooner.
Rather than cutting Mr Ali adrift as soon as he was told that The Daily Mail was about to publish a further audio recording of Mr Ali, Sir Keir waited while senior aides assembled without him at Labour HQ.
Morgan Mcsweeney, Labour’s campaign manager, Pat Mcfadden, the shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Labour Party national campaign co-ordinator, and political director Luke Sullivan, gathered in a room to furrow their brows, with Sir Keir’s chief of staff Sue Gray popping in and out and making calls to Sir Keir and Liam Didsbury, Labour’s north west regional director. Sir Alan Campbell, the Labour chief whip, was also in touch by phone.
After agonising over what to do for three hours, Labour MPS and activists on the ground in Rochdale were finally told at 5.30pm to stop campaigning for Mr Ali, and Mr Didsbury was given the task of telling Mr Ali that he was now on his own.
For reasons that remain unclear, it took another two hours for Labour HQ to send a notice to the press formally announcing that it had suspended the candidate.
Sources with knowledge of the day’s events spoke about the party’s duty of care to Mr Ali, and the fact that his career was being taken away from him, while simultaneously stressing that Sir Keir made the final decision and that it was the only option open to him.
Two hours later, the Daily Mail’s website published the full audio recording of Mr Ali’s comments.
By then, Sir Keir had spent considerable political capital sending out a series of shadow cabinet ministers to publicly defend Mr Ali, who had immediately apologised for the remarks he had made in a meeting with activists after the story was broken by The Mail on Sunday on Saturday night.
Lisa Nandy, the shadow international development minister, even appeared at a constituency event with Mr Ali after the first report dropped, in scenes that raised eyebrows in the Labour Party.
On Sunday morning, Nick Thomas-symonds, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, made matters worse when he argued that Labour would continue to campaign for Mr Ali because he had fallen for an “online conspiracy theory”.
But the ultimate humiliation was reserved for Mr Mcfadden, who was forced to become the public face of the flip-flop. The veteran campaigner had to go out on the Sunday morning broadcast round to defend Mr Ali, before appearing back in front of the cameras on Monday evening to explain why Labour had to drop him as a candidate.
In the face of repeated questions about Sir Keir’s slowness to act, he insisted the Labour leader had acted “swiftly” when alerted to the new allegations and taken a “tough but necessary decision”.
Ed Balls, a former Labour chancellor, accused the party’s leadership of “taking their eye off the ball” when it came to Mr Ali because he was a loyal supporter of Sir Keir.
Mish Rahman, a Left-wing member of the National Executive Committee, Labour’s governing body, questioned why Sir Keir had to be “dragged kicking and screaming” to the decision.
He added: “It just shows clearly that the party’s due diligence, which should be done for all candidates, is not done properly, it’s not taken seriously, there’s different standards. It just shows it up for the sham that it has been.”
Martin Forde KC, a leading lawyer who conducted a 2022 inquiry into anti-semitism within the Labour Party, said that Sir Keir’s handling of the issue had been “pretty shambolic”.
‘The party’s due diligence is not done properly. It just shows it up for the sham that it has been’