His shambolic U-turn over the Rochdale candidate is Starmer’s biggest blunder yet
The time it took the Labour leader to drop his would-be MP for sharing antisemitic conspiracy theories suggests he’ll find the speed and pressure of making calls at No 10 a worrying challenge, writes John Rentoul
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.
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