Sir Keir Starmer had hoped Labour’s first full week of campaigning would highlight his policies on health, policing and energy. Instead it has been overtaken by questions about the would-be prime minister’s authority and judgment.
On Friday afternoon the Labour leader finally announced that Diane Abbott, Britain’s first Black female MP, could stand for the party again in the July 4 general election after days of accusations that he was blocking left-wing candidates.
It was a pivot from his insistence, repeated only hours earlier at an event in Scotland, that “no decision has been taken” on Abbott’s future candidacy and that the matter was for the party’s ruling national executive committee to judge.
The events have reopened wounds from a time of intraparty factional warfare when Starmer took over from hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn. Critics warn that the row has shaken Labour’s support among its younger, Black and left-wing voter base.
“What it tells us about the Labour party is they need to change the way they behave if they’re going to govern from July 5 onwards,” said John McTernan, former adviser to New Labour prime minister Sir Tony Blair.
He said the party had had to be “taken back from the Corbynites”, but warned of a danger of overcorrection.
Labour has become so “obsessed with not losing votes to the right” that it has lost sight of the importance of appealing to progressive voters, who he argued made up two-thirds of the electorate.
The row over Abbott’s future in the party erupted on Tuesday when The Times reported that the veteran Labour MP had been blocked from standing as a candidate.
The story collapsed what had been a carefully choreographed deal to readmit her into the Parliamentary Labour party after she made comments last year viewed as playing down racism suffered by Jewish people.
In return, she would have announced her retirement after 37 years in parliament, opening up the safe seat for a Starmer loyalist, according to two people familiar with the matter.
By Wednesday evening, Abbott was on the steps on Hackney town hall, vowing that she would remain an MP in her constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington “by any means possible”. The “peace deal”, as one person put it, was dead.
Leading Black figures in entertainment, academia and literature hit out at the party’s “disrespectful” treatment of Abbott and warned in a letter to The Guardian it risked ceding the backing of its most loyal supporters.
The episode also triggered a split in the party at its highest ranks, as Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner and Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar challenged Starmer’s authority by saying Abbott should be allowed to stand.
Starmer publicly denied Abbott had been blocked, saying the matter had not been decided. He insisted it was a matter for the NEC. The Labour leader’s shadow science and technology secretary Peter Kyle said it was a situation that “Diane herself got herself into”.
By Friday, Starmer’s prouncement that Abbott could stand showed that the leader “had the power all along” to decide, as Mish Rahman, an NEC member, put it to Times Radio.
Labour had scheduled thematic campaign days before the controversy erupted on its health, crime and energy policies. However, the party’s meticulously orchestrated events and speeches were pushed off news bulletins as the saga over the treatment of Abbott dominated the agenda.
Some Labour officials said Starmer should have acted with greater alacrity to draw a line under the row by confirming whether Abbott was banned or allowed to stand.
The rancour worsened as Starmer was accused of mounting a “purge” of leftwing figures, after Labour withdrew its support from two leftwing candidates: economist Faiza Shaheen and sitting MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle.
Shaheen was blocked from standing for Labour in Chingford and Woodford Green after liking a social media post that referred to a “hysterical” Israel lobby that harassed critics of the country, for which she apologised.
Meanwhile Russell-Moyle was blocked from contesting Brighton Kemptown and Peacehaven over a complaint about his past behaviour that he described as “vexatious”.
As leftists were blocked, Labour parachuted a series of figures from the centre and the right of the party into safe seats. During an election campaign, Labour rules allow its governing body to impose candidates on local associations. Several members of the body have been selected as candidates this week.
Shaheen, who received an email saying she was stripped of her candidacy on Wednesday while she was out campaigning, said the Labour leadership had banked on the fact there would be little blowback from the decision to oust her because “they thought ‘no one even knows who that is’”.
She told the Financial Times it was “great” that the party was letting Abbott stand but it was clear that they had only come to that decision because they had not anticipated the scale of the public anger.
“The damage is already done,” she said, claiming Labour had lost support from swaths of the party membership, particularly young voters.
Rob Ford, politics professor at Manchester University, said the debacle had been “a mess and a distraction for Labour”, but predicted attention would shift on to a new topic within days.
He warned worse dangers lay ahead for Starmer if he wins the election, however, and that he risked opening his left flank to the Greens.
“The bigger issue is the Labour leadership storing up trouble for later, once they are the unpopular incumbents,” Ford said.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives have enjoyed the drama after a difficult start to their own campaign last week.
A Tory spokesperson accused Rayner of “pushing Keir Starmer around” and said the episode showed he was “a weak leader who’s losing control of the Labour party”.
However one person close to Starmer insisted his authority should not be in doubt over the affair, saying: “He expressed a view [on Friday] which we understand the NEC will rubber stamp, because he’s in control of the party.”
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