Conspiracists, chancers and a sexter – Rochdale deserves better, and frankly we all do

Full hazmat kit, please, for the Rochdale byelection, where the chaos and cast of grotesque characters says so much about the state of British politics. All of it bad. This is one of those byelection campaigns that makes you yearn to immerse yourself in sheep dip just from reading about it.

Assuming you’re now suited up, here’s a recap of where we are. This weekend, the Mail on Sunday revealed that the Labour candidate, Azhar Ali, had claimed the Israeli government deliberately permitted and enabled the slaughter of 1,139 of its people by Hamas terrorists on 7 October as cover for military action. It was too late to take Ali off the ballot. Yet his selection alone was now eye-catching, as was Keir Starmer’s clear inconsistency. For instead of immediately withdrawing support for him, the Labour leadership explained Ali had apologised, wasn’t antisemitic, and had just fallen for some repulsive conspiracy theory he had read online, which was wrong but the sort of thing it was evidently excusable for putative members of parliament to do. Senior Labour figures went out to defend this line.

Then last night – as Rishi Sunak was about to explain to an audience that backing Ali showed Labour hadn’t changed since the Corbyn years – Starmer’s office announced that “new information” had come to light. Further comments by their Rochdale pick had apparently surfaced, causing them to withdraw support for Ali, who will now be on the ballot as Labour’s candidate but is formally disowned. Labour’s national campaign coordinator, Pat McFadden, explained this decision was “tough but necessary”, which is politics for “late and messy”. There was a whiff of the Boris Johnson playbook, when senior Tories were forever being marched up the hill in defence of something indefensible, only for the leader to belatedly reverse ferret. But more on Starmer’s U-turn in a bit.

First, back to Rochdale’s cursed election. We haven’t got time to meet all 11 candidates (all male), though the Green party guy is has “decided to leave the stage” over historic social media posts criticising the Islamic faith. He too will appear on the ballot, as it was too late to change him. All this is grist to the mill of George Galloway, the former unitarded Celebrity Big Brother cat who has fought even more seats than he’s had wives, and is running in Rochdale on a specifically anti-Starmer, pro-Gaza ceasefire ticket.

If you’re wondering where Galloway last had a crack (at a seat, not a wife), let me take you to Batley and Spen, where he came third in the 2021 byelection that saw Kim Leadbeater elected by the constituency formerly held by her murdered sister, Jo Cox. Something to put matters into perspective, there – yet the morning after this rancorous byelection found Galloway standing outside the count incanting self-pity for the news cameras. “This was peak Kirklees,” he whined. “Not even enough chairs to sit on. Not even a coffee at 4am.”

Oh, do buck up, you ridiculous tit. Earlier in the campaign, Galloway had told Owen Jones in an interview that he would “eat my hat” if Labour didn’t come third. As indicated, they won that one, but I see he’s still wearing the hat. And let’s be very clear: a man in public life who wears a felt hat inside these days is alerting you that he’s one to swerve. Medieval leprosy bells were obviously cruel; modern indoor trilbies are not. Heed their warnings.

Rochdale candidate (and former Celebrity Big Brother cat) George Galloway. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Even so, Azhar Ali’s situation gives Galloway a further poll boost in Rochdale, as it does to a rather lesser extent Simon Danczuk, the disgraced former Labour MP for the town, who is recontesting the seat for Reform. Reform is the party founded by Nigel Farage, while Farage was of course endorsed in 2019 by Galloway. There’s more horseshoe theory in Rochdale than a state-of-the-art stud.

And so to Danczuk, speaking of a chap no one bar himself could describe as a state-of-the-art stud. And he probably has, in one or other car-crash public outing. I still have flashbacks to a joint Sunday Times interview he did with his last-but-one wife, Karen, in which she offered various thoughts on why she had to keep getting her “ding-dongs” out in pictures, while Simon reiterated the theory that a faulty phone charger was responsible for his account favouriting hardcore pornography accounts.

Anyway, Danczuk was suspended from the Labour party in 2015, when it was discovered he had been exchanging explicit text messages with a 17-year-old girl. Yesterday, Simon contacted Starmer explaining that Azhar Ali was “damaging our town, democracy and community relations”, which was fairly explicit in the other meaning of the word. Though this time it took the form of a letter and not a text.

Perhaps Starmer should have treated the Azhar Ali problem as a simulated training exercise for the constant vagaries of government. Taking at least 36 hours to call it (and probably 48, given when the Mail on Sunday would have gone to him for a comment) is a hard fail. This was not a tricky choice. The branches of this particular decision tree were not a vast and densely woven thicket through which Sir Keir needed exceptional knightly skill to slash. It was basically a three-step flow chart. 1. “Did the candidate say something wholly unacceptable?” YES, leading to 2. “Is it fine for would-be MPs to say wholly unacceptable things if they think they’re true just because they read them on Facebook?” NO, leading to 3. Bin off the candidate.

I guess we are where we are. And what if that place is Rochdale? Neither Galloway nor Danczuk could be accused of campaigning with a story of hope – but perhaps Rochdale could be forgiven for no longer expecting that. It was represented for 20 years by the “larger than life” Liberal politician Cyril Smith, a hideous establishment paedophile who was never charged and whose crimes were ignored for decades by local police and council figures, among others. Later, Rochdale was one of the towns to become notorious for another child abuse scandal – the rape, abuse and exploitation of underage girls by local, largely Pakistani-heritage men, with the council and police again accused of ignoring it, with many believing the issue and the institutional failings it exposed remain active.

It was Rochdale where Gordon Brown was unwittingly overheard calling Gillian Duffy “a bigoted woman”, and Rochdale that will now be associated with ominous tensions between Labour and sections of its voters. The pathway to what should be the goal of politics – making life better for its townspeople – is a long and hard one. And it recedes even further into the distance with a byelection like this.