Starmer’s struggle to keep his party united on Gaza has just got harder

echoed around the open space. Hailing his victory over Labour and the Tories, he claimed authorship of the phrase “two cheeks of the same a---”, before adding: “And that a--- was spanked.”

The victory rally was a fittingly bizarre end to a most unusual of by-election contests which was effectively forfeited by the two major parties from the offset. Only 45 minutes earlier Mr Galloway had been declared the winner of the contest at Rochdale Leisure Centre, a mile down the road, amid chaotic scenes.

There were raucous cheers from his supporters as it was announced he had won more than 12,000 votes, in the process securing a comfortable majority of 5,679. If anything the roar was even louder a few seconds later when it was confirmed David Tully, a local businessman, had beaten the Tories and Labour to second place.

Azhar Ali, Labour’s candidate who was suspended over an anti-Semitism row, was not on the podium to hear that he had crashed into fourth.

Neither was Simon Danczuk, the former Rochdale MP representing Reform, after Richard Tice, his party leader, alleged that the by-election had not been “free and fair”. In truth, all those involved in the race had long known it was over, with Mr Galloway’s team declaring victory barely an hour after the polls had closed.

As the final votes were tallied up in Rochdale’s sports hall, its walls an alarming shade of luminescent green, the scale of his win was there for all to see. Fenced off by a square of tables, polling officials rolled up bundles of ballot sheets and stuffed them vertically into black boxes bearing the candidate’s name. In short order they were stacking box after box in the spot marked “George Galloway”, building a plastic and paper skyscraper that loomed over all the others. Moments

‘Sir Keir will pay a high price for the catastrophe presently going on in occupied Palestine’

later the Left-wing firebrand opened his victory speech with a booming rebuke to his former party, bellowing: “Keir Starmer, this is for Gaza.”

And it is here that lies the political impact of Mr Galloway’s victory. In short, Sir Keir’s struggle to keep the Labour Party united over Gaza has just become a whole lot harder.

To understand why that is so problematic, look at what Mr Galloway said early yesterday morning. He told Sir Keir in that victory speech: “You will pay a high price, in enabling, encouraging and covering, for the