Andy McSmith's Diary: ‘Anti-Semitic’ jack of all trades leaves a hole in Woking

Vicki Kirby may have ended up by doing Labour a service, by giving a focus to that uneasy feeling that the party was becoming a home for bigots, so long as their bigotry was directed at Jews.

In retrospect, it is extraordinary that a Labour parliamentary candidate could post a message on Twitter saying that Jews have “big noses” and suggesting that Hitler was the “Zionist God” and suffer nothing worse than a few months’ suspension.

That suspension came to an end some time ago, but was reimposed on 15 March as a counter-attack gathered pace.

The Labour MP Wes Streeting, who is at a Berlin conference on anti-Semitism, remarked on Facebook: “If this were any other form of racism, it would have been stamped upon by now. Instead, the Labour Party looks apathetic about anti-Semitism. Jewish Labour members have cut up their membership cards.”

The Jewish Labour Movement, a part of the party since 1920, has announced its intention to affiliate to Vicki Kirby’s local Labour Party, in Woking, with the express purpose of launching a vote of no confidence in her. Kelvin McKeever, the Labour candidate to be Northamptonshire’s Police Commissioner, has complained about her to Surrey Police.

Why did Labour get into this mess? A possible explanation is that all political parties struggle to find the volunteers to run their organisations, especially in places where support is thin on the ground.

Woking is a solid Tory seat. Vicki Kirby was not just vice-chair of Woking Labour Party, and partner of the chairman, Barry Faulkner, she was its trade union liaison officer and communications and campaigns co-ordinator too.

Her suspension leaves a lot of gaps.

Slip of the tongue to savour

Are you hoping to save the world, like Gordon Brown claimed to have done in a famous slip of the tongue seven years ago? The ageing performance poet John Cooper Clarke has bad news. “Nobody can save the world,” he told Q magazine. “Have you seen the size of the fucker?”

Umunna’s awkward defence

Listeners to LBC on 15 March will have heard an argument that went nowhere over what Chuka Umunna, Labour’s former shadow Business Secretary, may have said about the EU. “Chuka, you said that 50 per cent of law in this country comes from the EU,” Boris Johnson chided him.

“You are seeking to put words in my mouth that I have never said,” Umunna riposted.

What Johnson was half-recalling was a press release issued in Umunna’s name by the Labour Party on 25 October 2011, rubbishing the latest Government promise to reduce the regulations governing British businesses.

“The Tory-led Government has over-promised and under-delivered. For example, its ‘one in one out’ rule does not apply to EU legislation which accounts for around half of all new regulation,” it said. Not the same as saying that half our laws come from the EU, but not all that different either. There will be many more arguments of this kind between now and 23 June.

Reality is an £1,800 fine

Not many people remember the We Are the Reality Party, a relaunched version of the Reality Party founded in Salford in 2014 by Mark Berry, aka Bez, better known as the maracas player, dancer and mascot of the band Happy Mondays.

The party had a hard-hitting manifesto with which Jeremy Corbyn would find few points of disagreement.

Bez was the candidate in Salford in last year’s general election. Sadly, reality has since caught up with We Are the Reality, in the form of electoral law, which sets a time limit within which all parties that contest elections, no matter how small, are required to submit to the Electoral Commission an account of their election expenditure. We Are the Reality has been hit with a £1,800 fine for missing that deadline.