If Labour loses the Batley and Spen by-election, Keir Starmer will survive

Sir Alan Campbell, Labour’s chief whip, is so new to the post that his Twitter account still describes him as the deputy chief whip, two and a half weeks after Keir Starmer became the third Labour leader to sack Nick Brown in order to assert his authority over his MPs (after Tony Blair in 1998 and Ed Miliband in 2010).

Sir Alan made his first appearance at the dispatch box in his new role yesterday, when he moved the writ for the by-election in Batley and Spen, the seat vacated by Tracy Brabin, who has been elected mayor of West Yorkshire. The convention is that the party previously holding the seat gets to decide the date of the by-election, and Starmer has gone for 1 July.

There is no good time for Labour to hold this by-election. Starmer’s mistake was to allow Brabin to run for the West Yorkshire mayoralty in the first place, but now that a by-election has to be held, he has decided that it might as well be sooner than later.

All the numbers look bad for Labour. The Conservatives need a swing of 3.4 per cent to win the seat. Governing parties don’t usually get swings in their favour in by-elections, but in Hartlepool three weeks ago the swing from Labour to Tory was 16 per cent.

Batley and Spen, which voted 60 per cent to leave the EU, is not as Brexity as Hartlepool, where the Leave vote was 70 per cent, but the Brexit realignment of politics – combined with Boris Johnson’s vaccine-boosted popularity – makes holding the seat a daunting task for Labour.

This time Labour has chosen a stronger candidate than in Hartlepool, where Paul Williams was a noted Remainer and a defeated MP from a nearby seat. Labour has chosen Kim Leadbeater, the sister of Jo Cox, the Batley MP who was murdered in 2016. Not only does she have a symbolic bond with the constituency, therefore, but she sold herself to Labour members as “the candidate the Tories fear”.

It is a mark of how low the party has sunk that it is notable when a Labour politician regards beating the Conservatives as a priority.

Even so, this is going to be a hard seat to hold, and private Labour views range from “it’s a write-off” to “miracles can happen”. The party’s nerves were not helped yesterday by George Galloway announcing that he was a candidate.

The former Labour MP and serial irritant is standing as an anti-Starmer candidate, referring to himself in the third person on Twitter: “If you want to see the back of Sir Keir Starmer, George is your man.”

His politics are so unusual that he wasn’t even let back into the party by Jeremy Corbyn, despite Galloway’s friendship with Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s – I have to look up the title every time – executive director of strategy and communications.

Galloway is not the force he once was, when he won Bethnal Green and Bow in east London on an anti-Iraq war ticket in 2005, and Bradford West in 2012. And Batley, with its 19 per cent Muslim population, may not be as receptive to his culturally specific messages as Bethnal Green (35 per cent Muslim) or Bradford West (51 per cent).

Galloway’s most recent electoral venture, the pro-union All for Unity list in the Scottish parliament elections, was a miserable failure; as was his 1.4 per cent vote in the London mayoral election in 2016. If Galloway wins any votes at all, however, they are likely to come at Labour’s expense.

More significant is the question of whether Paul Halloran will stand. He came third at the general election, with 12 per cent of the vote, standing as a Heavy Woollen District Independent, whose platform included a “clean Brexit”. Halloran served the same purpose as the Brexit Party candidate in Hartlepool, saving the seat for Labour at the 2019 election by splitting the Leave vote.

No wonder he is in talks with the Reform Party – as the Brexit Party has been renamed – about being its candidate. If he stands, he will take votes from the Conservative, Ryan Stephenson, a local councillor from outside the constituency.

The main relevance of Galloway’s candidacy is not whether he will affect the result, then, but whether he is right that a Labour defeat in Batley would mean the end of Starmer’s leadership. This seems improbable.

Losing Batley would be bad, but it would be no worse than losing Hartlepool. The only question for Labour MPs on the morning of 2 July will be: “Would a different leader do better?”

There would have to be 40 of them saying “yes” to that question to launch a leadership challenge – and it would help in organising that enterprise if they agreed who the alternative leader might be. Starmer is not in a good position, but I don’t think he will have to fight to stay on as leader yet.