Mick Hartley

Patrick O'Flynn in the Spectator – What the Rochdale disaster says about Keir Starmer:

Starmer’s flip-flopping and lack of principle is already, as financial market analysts say, ‘priced in’. Voters have noticed his U-turns on everything from trans rights to green investment and do not expect him to do the right thing at first contact with any problem. In normal times that might indeed be a disabling fault in someone aspiring to be prime minister, as indeed it proved for the former unilateral disarmer Neil Kinnock back in the day. But these are not normal times because the Conservative party brand is holed below the waterline.

What Starmer’s appalling handling of an obviously open-and-shut case of indefensible bigotry does offer though is a troubling glimpse into the likely course of his looming premiership.

He stood by Ali for the best part of three days despite the candidate’s peddling of the disgusting and false conspiracy theory that Israel deliberately facilitated the October 7 pogrom against its own citizens. He even sent a series of senior frontbenchers out to bat for Ali, including Pat McFadden, Lisa Nandy and Nick Thomas-Symonds.

And only when they had made themselves look soft on anti-Semitism did he pull the rug from Ali, after the Daily Mail had disclosed further remarks in a similar vein: that Jews in the media were whipping things up and Israel had been planning a land-grab in Gaza, that sort of thing.

This is the kind of conduct that contributed heavily to Boris Johnson being defenestrated at the behest of dozens of ministers who had become heartily sick of getting sent out on to the airwaves to trash their own reputations by peddling unsustainable positions.

Not that Starmer will care. It's amost certain he'll be the next PM. And whatever happens in Rochdale – a George Galloway win, perhaps, or Ali as an independent candidate – it won't matter in the larger scheme of things. It is though, as the saying goes, symptomatic of a deeper malaise.

But on Friday morning Starmer is still going to be smelling of roses as he basks in two more by-election wins in the Tory-held and once ‘safe’ seats of Kingswood and Wellingborough. Rochdale can then be written off as a little local difficulty. The flaws in his political technique are going to count heavily against him. But not yet.