Sir Keir Starmer has become accustomed to Labour in-fighting since he became leader 18 months ago. But as the former DPP battles to drag his party into some kind of vaguely electable shape, has he been neglecting matters closer to home? For in northwest London, on Keir Starmer’s doorstep, a vicious party battle has broken out involving smears, lies and a case of mistaken identity, all splashed across the pages of the Labour leader’s local newspaper.
The Camden New Journal – on which Sir Keir has spent more than £3,500 in adverts since April 2020 – has been breathlessly reporting this past fortnight all the twists and turns of some vicious skulduggery plaguing the local Labour party. Councillor Lazzaro Pietragnoli was yesterday forced to resign as Chief Whip after admitting he has secretly been running a secret Twitter account which attacked colleagues and called the former mayor a ‘scumbag.’ After being confronted last week by the Journal, Pietragnoli denied being behind the now-deleted @PHillmum account, instead blaming university professor Valentina Arena.
Who is Arena you might ask? Pietragnoli’s, er, wife. Unfortunately Arena does not appear to have taken kindly to being thrown under the bus by her husband, judging by the Journal’s grovelling apology to her and Pietragnoli’s subsequent admission of guilt. The councillor has in fact been running the five-year old account, while presenting himself as a mother living in social housing in Primrose Hill and raising three children. As the Journal notes drily: ‘nobody in the area had ever been able to identify the author of the @PHillmum feed despite its apparent in-depth knowledge of council affairs and forthright opinions on local issues.’
During Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Pietragnoli often offered sharp criticism of his own leader and promoted the idea of voting Green while he was in charge. He suggested that under Corbyn, the party was run by a clique which preferred ‘Putin, Assad, Iran’s ayatollahs to freedom and democracy’ and wrote that ‘Corbyn and shit are the only two words with any sense in your sentence.’ He also responded to the selection of fellow Labour councillor Maryam Eslamdoust as mayor by tweeting at his colleagues: ‘Are you happy that this scumbag is going to be the Mayor of Camden?’
Anonymous briefing and hostility towards Corbyn – looks like Sir Keir has brought the tensions of Westminster back home with him to Camden.
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