The latest Labour U-turn in Rochdale is Starmer’s biggest blunder yet

Keir Starmer is guilty of two kinds of flip-flop. On Azhar Ali, the by-election candidate in Rochdale, on the £28bn green investment plan, and on defining a woman, Starmer stuck stubbornly to a position before eventually conceding that his critics were right. Once again, Starmer has made the wrong decision, stuck to it, and managed to make the worst possible mess of finally changing to the right position There was a rationale for this, which was that it was too late to take Ali off the ballot paper and that George Galloway, the former Labour MP, is standing as a supposedly pro-Palestinian candidate in Rochdale, in protest at Starmer’s refusal to call for a one-sided ceasefire. Starmer had support for his position from Louise Ellman, the Jewish former Labour MP, and Mike Katz of the Jewish Labour Movement, who said it would be worse for Galloway to win than Ali. Unfortunately, it did it in the worst possible way, saying that “following new information about further comments made by Azhar Ali coming to light today”, the party had withdrawn its support.