George Galloway will be back in parliament on Monday with his megaphone and a new platform to rail against Labour.
His theme is Gaza and his menace is clear.
As he accepted victory in the Rochdale by-election at around 3.30am (at a rally in a Subaru car showroom of all places), the veteran left-wing agitator warned Sir Keir Starmer “[his] problems just got 100 times more serious than they were before today”.
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In Mr Galloway’s world, his win was the beginning of an earthquake that would flatten Sir Keir’s Labour.
“This is going to spark a movement, a landslide, a shifting of the tectonic plates in scores of parliamentary constituencies,” he said.
Labour, he said, was “on notice that they have lost the confidence of millions of their voters who loyally and traditionally voted for them”.
On Electoral Dysfunction this week Jess Phillips, Ruth Davidson and I discuss how much this disruptor will damage Labour and how big the electoral problem of Gaza is for Sir Keir.
It is something that Ms Phillips, who has a large Muslim community in her Birmingham Yardley constituency, feels very strongly about.
She resigned from the Labour frontbench last year after deciding she couldn’t support the party over the Israel-Hamas war.
And she is fuming over what she sees as Mr Galloway’s sanctimony as he purports to be fighting for the people of Gaza when all he really wants to do is to sock it to Labour, as he has been trying to do in various seats for various political parties since he was kicked out of the party more than 20 years ago.
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Ms Phillips said: “He is not a legitimate voice for the people of Gaza.
“He’s just trying to attack Keir Starmer.
“Knock yourself out. Attack Keir Starmer. That’s politics. I’m here for that. But don’t pretend to people who care about something that you’re going to change something.”
Mr Galloway would reject the suggestion he is not a “legitimate voice” for the people of Gaza, having campaigned on behalf of the Palestinian cause for decades. Speaking to Sky News in the wake of his victory last night, he said his views on the issue were “quite well known”.
As for whether Labour would have lost this seat to Mr Galloway regardless of whether its suspended candidate Azhar Ali had stood for Labour or not – a view of some in the party – Ms Phillips says she doesn’t know.
But what she does acknowledge is Mr Galloway’s near 6,000 majority is “testament to a broader problem” for the party.
She said: “There is a clear problem with Muslim communities feeling represented currently by the Labour movement.
“Muslim people do not want to be represented by total charlatans.
“They also want to come to you for help and need decent representation and good, good people, both from within and without their community.
“They have been saying for some time, we are losing faith, if only we noticed it.”
Listen to Beth Rigby, Jess Phillips and Ruth Davidson as they unravel the spin in a new weekly podcast from Sky News
I don’t buy Mr Galloway’s assertion that he is triggering a “movement” across “scores” of Labour seats – not least because these divisions have been in plain sight for months, with councillors and activists quitting Labour because of the tensions over Gaza.
In some Labour seats it is undoubtedly a real problem, but what doesn’t follow is that these difficulties lead to electoral failure in a general election across a number of seats.
The by-election swings in all other races tell a very different story, with over half of Labour’s biggest by-election swings ever happening in the last couple of years.
“Rochdale was the anomaly and not any kind of indication of where we are,” says one senior Labour figure.
“At the beginning of the [Rochdale] campaign it was clear that some previous Labour voters had moved away from us on the issue of Gaza but at the same time we were picking up a lot of previous Tory voters.”
While Ms Phillips is clearly frustrated with her party leadership over Gaza, Ms Davidson says she feels “a little bit sorry” for Sir Keir, who she thinks had no option but to be fulsome in support of Israel against the backdrop of a Labour party that had been so badly tarnished by the rows over antisemitism in its ranks during the Jeremy Corbyn years.
“I think what the Gaza situation thing has exploded about is the fact that Keir Starmer had so much work to do off of Jeremy Corbyn to try and rebuild trust with Jewish communities across this country,” says Ms Davidson.
“He had to do that if he was going to be a credible candidate for the prime minister of this country; he had to make that reparation.
“And that is now being used against him. The bit [from Galloway’s election flyers], which was about Starmer being this great friend of Israel, is being used as a stick to beat him with.”
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