Labour has dissolved a local selection panel in a row over candidates for the prized seat of Camberwell and Peckham, currently held by Harriet Harman, with officials reinstalling a key adviser to Sadiq Khan on to the shortlist.
The party has accused the local selection panel of party members of leaking details to a local website that the shortlist drawn up by the constituency party was just three names.
Officials from the party’s national executive committee have now put forward a shortlist of four, including Johnson Situ, who works for Khan and was previously a councillor and cabinet member in Southwark.
The local panel, which does not routinely have the final say over selection, had shortlisted just three candidates: the youth violence charity leader Peter Babudu, former Ed Miliband adviser Miatta Fahnbulleh who heads the left thinktank New Economics Foundation, and councillor Evelyn Akoto.
Fahnbulleh received eight nominations from local branches, followed by Babudu, with seven; Akoto recevied three and Situ, two.
Labour suspended the local election panel shortly after the most of its members voted to exclude Situ, with sources blaming the suspension on briefing to the local media, Southwark News, which they said had undermined the final decision on the shortlist.
The shortlist is now four candidates including Situ, with the final vote scheduled to take place on 19 November. Local party sources alleged Situ had been excluded by the left-leaning local panel for factional reasons for being perceived to be too close to the party leadership.
An ally of Situ’s said: “Johnson has the support of hundreds of local Labour members, the biggest trade union in the country – Unison – and a number of local Labour branches. It’s absolutely right that Johnson is on the shortlist for the constituency he has called home all his life.”
The source said the party had been clear there was a lack of black men in the parliamentary party, which Labour had been determined to improve.
Allowing the NEC to intervene is part of a package of changes to the selections process introduced by Keir Starmer, which his allies said was to stop local panels excluding credible candidates, as well as improving diversity on shortlists.
The selection process in the seat has already come under criticism after the veteran anti-racism campaigner Maurice Mcleod was excluded from standing for the seat, reportedly over concerns about his social media activity.
A spokesperson for the grassroots activist group Momentum said: “First the Labour machine blocked a prominent, trade union-backed anti-racist activist in Maurice Mcleod. Now, they have completely overridden the rights of local Labour members in Camberwell and Peckham by imposing centralised control of the selection process. This kind of elite stitch-up is exactly what turns people off politics.”
Other leftwing candidates have been excluded from longlists by party investigations, usually because of past comments or social media issues, including senior councillors in Hastings and Stroud, as well as the former MP Emma Dent Coad.
Senior Labour officials have said they are undertaking a through vetting process ahead of the next election to include high-quality candidates, including those likely to be future ministers, rejecting claims that the vetting has been on a factional basis.
The party has selected just one left-leaning candidate in target seats so far, out of about 40 – Faiza Shaheen in Chingford and Woodford Green, who stood in 2019.
