Sometimes a single act changes the entire course of events for years to come.
For instance, many Manchester United football fans fondly recall the moment in 1990 that a young striker called Mark Robins scored a crucial goal in an FA Cup tie that saved the job of Alex Ferguson, who had at that stage not won a trophy three seasons into his tenure.
So might Tory supporters point in future years to Keir Starmer’s disastrous mishandling of the anti-Semitic comments of his Rochdale candidate Azhar Ali as the moment that changed the game for them? In short, no.
Starmer’s flip-flopping and lack of principle is already, as financial market analysts say, ‘priced in’. Voters have noticed his U-turns on everything from trans rights to green investment and do not expect him to do the right thing at first contact with any problem. In normal times that might indeed be a disabling fault in someone aspiring to be prime minister, as indeed it proved for the former unilateral disarmer Neil Kinnock back in the day. But these are not normal times because the Conservative party brand is holed below the waterline.
What Starmer’s appalling handling of an obviously open-and-shut case of indefensible bigotry does offer though is a troubling glimpse into the likely course of his looming premiership.
He stood by Ali for the best part of three days despite the candidate’s peddling of the disgusting and false conspiracy theory that Israel deliberately facilitated the October 7 pogrom against its own citizens. He even sent a series of senior frontbenchers out to bat for Ali, including Pat McFadden, Lisa Nandy and Nick Thomas-Symonds.
And only when they had made themselves look soft on anti-Semitism did he pull the rug from Ali, after the Daily Mail had disclosed further remarks in a similar vein: that jews in the media were whipping things up and Israel had been planning a land-grab in Gaza, that sort of thing.
This is the kind of conduct that contributed heavily to Boris Johnson being defenestrated at the behest of dozens of ministers who had become heartily sick of getting sent out on to the airwaves to trash their own reputations by peddling unsustainable positions.
So the next shadow cabinet meeting is unlikely to be a happy affair and if Starmer’s political judgment does not get very much better in office then he will enjoy a honeymoon period of similar duration to a typical male Black Widow spider (which gets eaten by his sweetheart).
Yet the electorate is of a mind to tackle its problems in descending order of seriousness. And problem number one is the Conservatives. Betting markets today still give Ali a one in three chance of becoming Rochdale’s next MP even without the official Labour machine behind him, though the yet more energetic Israel-basher George Galloway is now favourite. The Tory candidate is, by contrast, rated a 50-1 shot by William Hill, despite the party winning nearly a third of the vote and finishing a strong second at the last general election.
The veteran and very well-connected Labour watcher Michael Crick yesterday revealed that a sewage pipe inside the Rochdale campaign headquarters of the party had burst, causing according to his contact, ‘the whole downstairs to be covered with the proverbial’. It is indeed a hot mess.
But on Friday morning Starmer is still going to be smelling of roses as he basks in two more by-election wins in the Tory-held and once ‘safe’ seats of Kingswood and Wellingborough. Rochdale can then be written off as a little local difficulty. The flaws in his political technique are going to count heavily against him. But not yet.
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