The sacking of Azhar Ali as Labour’s candidate in the Rochdale by-election is the biggest disaster for Sir Keir Starmer in his nearly four years as leader of the party.
There will now be an almighty inquest into how a candidate who had made such comments about Israel and Gaza was selected for such a high-profile by-election.
Defending Rochdale was never going to be easy for Labour. Sir Tony Lloyd’s majority at the 2019 general election was 9,668, with the Conservatives in second place.
But the challenge from firebrand left-winger George Galloway and the constituency’s former Labour MP Simon Danczuk standing for Reform UK already presented difficulties.
But now Labour goes into the by-election on 29 February with no candidate, even though Mr Ali’s name will still be on the ballot paper, right at the top of the list in alphabetical order.
Why was he selected? Not surprisingly, as happens in many constituencies with a large ethnic minority population, the local Asian community will have wanted one of their own to represent them.
Mr Ali faced a strong challenge, however, from political journalist Paul Waugh, who was seen as the preferred choice of Sir Keir and the Labour leadership. It was something of a surprise when he wasn’t selected.
It has been reported that voting at the selection meeting was 87 votes for Mr Ali to 68 for Mr Waugh. Hardly a resounding victory for Mr Ali.
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And Mr Waugh, as an experienced Westminster operator, would surely have been a safe pair of hands.
But the Labour activists who chose Mr Ali weren’t were not selecting a political novice. He’s the leader of the Labour group on Lancashire County Council and he’s been a parliamentary candidate twice, in his home town of Pendle.
He stood against Tory MP Andrew Stephenson in 2015 and 2019, coming second, 6,186 votes behind Mr Stephenson in 2019. He also acted as an adviser to the Blair and Brown governments between 2005 and 2010.
Image: Azhar Ali, when he still had the Labour Party’s support, speaks in Rochdale during the launch of his by-election campaign. Pic: PA
He has nearly 25 years’ experience in local government, but alarm bells should have rung in the Labour high command over his backing for Jeremy Corbyn in the 2016 Labour leadership election.
That’s despite saying Mr Corbyn would be a disaster for the country in 2015, when Mr Corbyn first stood for leadership after the resignation of Ed Miliband.
So if the first Labour blunder was selecting Mr Ali in the first place, the second was standing by him for 48 hours after his comments about the 7 October attacks in Israel were first reported in the Mail on Sunday.
A third blunder was failing to discover that it wasn’t just the Mail on Sunday disclosure that was embarrassing. Labour now admits “new information” and “further comments” have come to light.
Senior Tories claim the disclosure of his controversial remarks prove that Sir Keir’s claims – made repeatedly in Prime Minister’s Questions and elsewhere in recent weeks – were a hollow sham.
On the Labour left, meanwhile, they claim it was grossly unfair that Sir Keir and the leadership backed Mr Ali when left-wingers Kate Osamor, Andy McDonald and Mr Corbyn himself had been suspended over antisemitism allegations.
But there may be worse to come for Labour. Suddenly, the Rochdale disaster – 17 days before polling day in that by-election – plunges the two by-elections this week, in Wellingborough and Kingswood, into potential disarray.
Until this weekend, bookies and pollsters had been predicting victory for Labour in both seats, even though Labour is fighting to overturn big Conservative majorities.
Now, any senior Labour figures campaigning in the final days ahead of polling day this Thursday – and indeed the candidates themselves – will be besieged by questions about Mr Ali and the Rochdale fiasco.
Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester, deputy party leader Angela Rayner and leading shadow cabinet member Lisa Nandy have all made high-profile visits to Rochdale to support Mr Ali in the past week.
The Tories, of course, will be cock-a-hoop. A week in which an embattled Rishi Sunak was facing a rise in inflation, two potential by-election wipe-outs and renewed plotting against him by Tory MPs has now turned into Christmas, Easter and his birthday all at once.
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McFadden on support being withdrawn for Ali
The veteran Labour MP John McDonnell told Sky News he couldn’t recall the sacking of a by-election candidate during a campaign before. And, in covering by-elections for 40 years, nor can I.
This is far worse for Sir Keir and Labour than the “Red wall” Hartlepool by-election defeat in 2021 and the ULEZ backlash that handed victory to the Tories in Boris Johnson’s Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency in July.
Labour’s lead in the opinion polls has remained stubbornly around the 20% mark for months. That could now change.
Will we see the beginning of the end of Labour’s seemingly unassailable poll lead?
Is this a turning point for the Tories? Possibly. They won’t win Rochdale, but they won’t care about that. Humiliation for Sir Keir Starmer is a massive gift for the Conservatives.
And despite all the talk from the likes of campaign chief Pat McFadden that Sir Keir has taken a tough decision, it doesn’t look like that.
It’s more than an embarrassing retreat and U-turn by the Labour leader. It’s also an unmitigated disaster for Labour and Sir Keir’s worst crisis in his time as leader.
Rachel Reeves has hinted that taxes are likely to be raised this autumn after a major U-turn on the government’s controversial welfare bill.
Sir Keir Starmer’s Universal Credit and Personal Independent Payment Bill passed through the House of Commons on Tuesday after multiple concessions and threats of a major rebellion.
MPs ended up voting for only one part of the plan: a cut to universal credit (UC) sickness benefits for new claimants from £97 a week to £50 from 2026/7.
Initially aimed at saving £5.5bn, it now leaves the government with an estimated £5.5bn black hole – close to breaching Ms Reeves’s fiscal rules set out last year.
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Rachel Reeves’s fiscal dilemma
In an interview with The Guardian, the chancellor did not rule out tax rises later in the year, saying there were “costs” to watering down the welfare bill.
“I’m not going to [rule out tax rises], because it would be irresponsible for a chancellor to do that,” Ms Reeves told the outlet.
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“We took the decisions last year to draw a line under unfunded commitments and economic mismanagement.
“So we’ll never have to do something like that again. But there are costs to what happened.”
Meanwhile, The Times reported that, ahead of the Commons vote on the welfare bill, Ms Reeves told cabinet ministers the decision to offer concessions would mean taxes would have to be raised.
The outlet reported that the chancellor said the tax rises would be smaller than those announced in the 2024 budget, but that she is expected to have to raise tens of billions more.
Sir Keir did not explicitly say that she would, and Ms Badenoch interjected to say: “How awful for the chancellor that he couldn’t confirm that she would stay in place.”
In her first comments after the incident, Ms Reeves said she was having a “tough day” before adding: “People saw I was upset, but that was yesterday.
“Today’s a new day and I’m just cracking on with the job.”
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“In PMQs, it is bang, bang, bang,” he said. “That’s what it was yesterday.
“And therefore, I was probably the last to appreciate anything else going on in the chamber, and that’s just a straightforward human explanation, common sense explanation.”
The family and friends of Diogo Jota and his brother Andre Silva have been joined by Liverpool stars past and present and other Portuguese players at the pair’s funeral near Porto.
Pictures below show the funeral at the Igreja Matriz de Gondomar church in the town of Gondomar near Porto. Click here for our liveblog coverage of the day’s events.
Image: Diogo Jota’s wife Rute Cardoso arrives for the funeral of him and his brother Andre Silva. Pic: Reuters
Image: Liverpool players Virgil van Dijk and Andrew Robertson arrive for the funeral. Pic: Reuters
Image: Van Dijk carried a wreath with Jota’s number 20 while Andrew Robertson’s had a 30 for Andre Silva. Pic: Reuters
Image: Liverpool captain Virgil van Dijk. Pic: Reuters
Image: Portugal player Ruben Neves arrives at the funeral. Pic: PA
Image: Liverpool’s Joe Gomez and manager Arne Slot arrive at the funeral of Diogo Jota and Andre Silva. Pic; PA
Image: Liverpool’s Ryan Gravenberch and Cody Gakpo (right) arrive at the funeral of Diogo Jota and Andre Silva
Image: Manchester City and Portugal player Bernardo Silva arrives at the funeral. Pic: AP
Image: The coffins are carried to the church. Pic: PA
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Miguell Rocha played with Jota for around ten years with Gondomar Sport Clube in Portugal.
Image: People line up to enter the church. Pic: AP
Image: Pallbearers carry the coffins of Diogo Jota and his brother Andre Silva
Image: Pic: Reuters
Image: Pic: AP
Image: People gather outside the Chapel of the Resurrection. Pic: Reuters
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The former captain was seen wiping away tears as he read messages and laid his tribute down.
Image: Fans pay their respects outside Anfield in Liverpool. Pic: Reuters
Image: A board with a picture of Diogo Jota outside Anfield Stadium. Pic: PA
Image: The coffins are carried to the church. Pic: PA
Britain’s most notorious gangster and the detective who pursued him have been involved in a bizarre confrontation…at a charity lunch.
Former Detective Superintendent Ian Brown was at a Kent golf club and about to give a talk on the infamous £26m Brink’s-Mat gold robbery when he was summoned from the stage by officials.
Mr Brown, who appeared on the award-winning Sky News StoryCast podcast The Hunt For The Brink’s-Mat Gold in 2019, said: “I go outside and they say ‘he’s here’ and I say ‘who’s here’ and they say that table over there in the corner, that’s Kenny Noye with a baseball cap pulled down over his head.”
Noye stabbed to death an undercover policeman during the Brink’s-Mat investigation, but was acquitted of murder, though he was jailed for handling the stolen gold.
Mr Brown, 86, said: “I went over to him and said ‘thanks for coming, nice of you to pop in’, but I don’t believe you’ve turned up with your sons and grandkids to listen to me telling how you killed a police officer.
“And he said ‘I want to make sure you don’t say I’ve been dealing drugs’ and I said ‘I’ve never said that Kenny’.”
The retired detective told Noye he wasn’t going to change his presentation just because he was there.
“He said ‘mate, I wouldn’t expect you to and I’ll come up [on stage] if you want me to’.
“Can you think how he’s turned up with his family to listen to somebody talking about you killing the police? Now, you put logic on that.”
The bizarre story emerged when I rang Mr Brown after I’d been told about the meeting.
Image: A Sky News podcast told the story of the Brink’s-Mat heist in 2019
I also wanted to ask him about the recent BBC hit drama series The Gold which retold the story of the Brink’s-Mat heist at Heathrow Airport in 1983.
“It was an absolute shambles, far too much dramatic licence and the real story was so much better,” said the ex-detective, whose job had been to follow the trail of the 6,800 gold bars to the US and the Caribbean.
He said he chatted to one of the show’s writers for a long time in a phone call but then heard no more.
“They invented people, changed a bit here and there and made it politically correct in so many ways. I’m just very sad that that is what people will believe.
“And I couldn’t work out who my character was supposed to be. I could have been one of the female cops.”
He also criticised the portrayal of Noye, now 78, as a likeable jack-the-lad character when the truth about the double killer with a volatile temper was quite different.