So why get involved now, Mr Sheridan?
WHEN Jeremy Corbyn said he was ‘present but not involved’ I thought he sounded like a maudlin middle-aged man explaining why his first marriage had failed.
Sadly, it was much more sinister than that. He was trying to explain away his attendance at a wreath-laying ceremony to honour Palestinian terrorists.
The anti-Semitism scandal that engulfs the UK Labour leader won’t go away – and the longer it goes on, the more you sense he doesn’t really want it to. He seems to like the hole he has dug for himself and if he gets tired digging, there is always someone like the former Scottish Labour MP Jim Sheridan to hand him a fresh spade.
Mr Sheridan’s intervention that he had sympathy for Jews who had been persecuted for ‘almost’ – ‘almost’, mark you – his entire adult life but now has none was truly shocking.
Labour’s anti-Semitism problem now festers north of the Border too.
Mr Sheridan accused the Jewish community of being in a ‘Blairite plot’. That would be similar to the ‘Blairite plot’ that got him elected as a Labour MP in 2001.
Mr Sheridan was also a senior trade unionist. If the Labour Party and the movement as a whole continues to support anti-Semitism, it will have betrayed everything it ever stood for.
Mr Sheridan is, of course, an ex-MP. He is no longer ‘present’ on the national stage and was yesterday suspended from the Labour Party.
How shameful he decided nonetheless to get ‘involved’.