What will Jeremy Corbyn do now?

Keir Starmer revealed in an interview on Friday that he had not spoken to Jeremy Corbyn since October last year. It is over a year since Labour’s former leader was suspended from the party because of his response to the report by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission on antisemitism in the party. While condemning antisemitism as “abhorrent”, Corbyn said: “The scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media.”

Corbyn and his supporters refuse to accept that these words seek to diminish the seriousness of the problem or to disown Corbyn’s responsibility for it when he was leader. A Labour disciplinary panel agreed with him, after Corbyn issued a further statement saying that “concerns” about antisemitism were neither “exaggerated nor overstated”. It ended his suspension after three weeks.

However, Starmer and Nick Brown, the Labour chief whip, then suspended him from the Parliamentary Labour Party, insisting that he should apologise for his initial reaction to the EHRC report. So far, Corbyn has refused.

This means he can no longer call himself a Labour MP and, crucially, that he cannot stand as an official Labour candidate at the next election. If the stand-off continues, this is going to create an unusual situation in Islington North, Corbyn’s safe Labour London constituency.

I doubt that Corbyn will apologise, or use any form of words that Starmer and Alan Campbell, Brown’s successor as chief whip, would consider acceptable. Corbyn is proud and stubborn, and his friends say he is deeply hurt by the suggestion that he personally is antisemitic.

Nor is he likely to withdraw from the fray, even though he will be nearly 75 at the likely date of the next election in May 2024. So the likelihood is that he will stand as an independent candidate in a constituency where he has a large personal following, having represented it since 1983 (when, incidentally, he was the official Labour candidate against the previous Labour MP, Michael O’Halloran, who had left the party and stood as an independent).

Although a recent boundary review proposed to abolish the constituency, the latest (draft) proposals retain it almost unchanged (losing one ward to Starmer’s neighbouring Holborn and St Pancras). Even so, as was discovered by David Gauke and other Conservatives who were expelled from their party by Boris Johnson and who stood in 2019 as independents, it is hard for an independent to hold a seat against their former party.

The Battle for Islington North could be one of the big subplots of the next election story.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator