Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Labour’s leaked report has forced Starmer’s hand

Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

It was all going so well for Sir Keir Starmer. He won the Labour leadership handsomely, appointed a fresh shadow cabinet, and was riding a wave of blessed non-scrutiny thanks to Covid-19. He had begun to make amends to the Jewish community for his party’s racist vendetta against them and there was a solid chance that political correspondents would learn how to spell his name.

Then, it leaked. An 860-page dossier prepared in the final months of Corbyn’s tenure which, going by the reports of those who have seen it, essentially exculpates the party of mishandling anti-Semitism charges. It says these complaints were not treated differently, a central allegation made by whistleblowers who spoke to Panorama. More ominously, the document is said to allege ‘abundant evidence of a hyper-factional atmosphere prevailing in party HQ in this period, which appears to have affected the expeditious and resolute handling of disciplinary complaints’.

According to the Guardian, the compilation charges that senior disciplinary staff ‘were bitterly opposed to the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn’ and ‘seem to have taken a view that the worse things got for Labour the happier they would be, since this might expedite Jeremy Corbyn’s departure from office’.

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