His shambolic U-turn over the Rochdale candidate is Starmer’s biggest blunder yet

Keir Starmer is guilty of two kinds of flip-flop. The first kind is from positions he adopted in order to win the leadership of a party still in the grip of Corbynism. Those U-turns showed a cynicism that sometimes took the breath away, but the logic of “what it takes” was irresistible.

The second kind is more serious: where he has made the wrong decision himself, not to appease Corbynite party members but because he thought they were the right choices for a mainstream centre-left party of government.

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.

The initial decision to stand by Ali was the worst of those, which may be why it took only 48 hours to be reversed. But all of them suggest that Starmer would find the speed and pressure of decision-making in government a challenge.

After it was reported on Saturday night that Ali had expressed the view that Israel had allowed the Hamas atrocities on 7 October, to provide an excuse for attacking Gaza, I assumed Labour’s response was a holding position. Lisa Nandy, the shadow levelling-up secretary, took part in an event in Rochdale with Ali on Sunday morning, and Pat McFadden, another member of the shadow cabinet who was on the Sunday TV shows, said merely that Ali had apologised.

But by the time Nick Thomas-Symonds, a third shadow cabinet minister, was sent out to do the media round on Monday morning, it became clear that Starmer really intended to carry on with a candidate who believed the unbelievable and who could hardly be expected to unbelieve it.

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. I can see why Starmer does not want Galloway in the House of Commons. As a former constituent of Galloway’s in Bethnal Green, I yield to no one in my opposition to his politics.

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. But Labour’s opposition to antisemitism has to be absolute; it cannot calculate degrees of awfulness. The party has to do the right thing and let the voters choose between suboptimal outcomes.

Late yesterday, the party belatedly did the right thing and disowned 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.

There was indeed “new information” as the Daily Mail had got hold of the full audio of Ali’s comments shortly after the 7 October massacres, in which he said other terrible things, including criticising “people in the media from certain Jewish quarters”. But the conspiracy theory that Israel was complicit in the attack on its own civilians was terrible – yet Labour implied that it thought it was somehow acceptable by saying that it was only because of “new information” that Ali was being disowned.

Why did Labour not just say that “after careful consideration” it had been decided that Ali couldn’t be supported? Why didn’t it take refuge in processology and say that some independent disciplinary body had now reached a decision after weighing the evidence? And why wasn’t Starmer explaining the decision in public?

Once again, the Labour leader has made the wrong decision, stuck to it, and managed to make the worst possible mess of finally changing to the right position.

On the £28bn, he, Rachel Reeves and Ed Miliband all tried to insist that the green ambition was the same, even as the notional investment allocated to it was more than halved. On the question of trans rights, Starmer’s instinct was to try to close down debate. When he was asked about the view of Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP, that only women have a cervix, he said: “That shouldn’t be said.” He didn’t just disagree with it; he said that there should be no discussion about it. He has since moved to a more complicated position, negotiated by Anneliese Dodds, shadow minister for women and equalities, and he has accepted that people will legitimately hold different views.

In all these cases, he has ended up in a better position than he started with, so the damage to his reputation is limited. But it does not augur well for decision-making in government, if Labour were to win the election and he became prime minister.