Labour has suspended a second parliamentary candidate over their remarks about Israel, as Keir Starmer struggles to contain the fallout from the leak of a private meeting of party activists in Lancashire last year.
Party sources said on Tuesday that Labour had suspended Graham Jones, the candidate for Hyndburn, less than 24 hours after the party withdrew its support from Azhar Ali, its candidate for the Rochdale byelection later this month.
With the party now looking for two new candidates for the general election, senior Labour figures were fighting among each other on Tuesday over who was to blame for the escalating crisis.
One Labour activist called the party’s handling of the controversy a “shitshow”. A senior Labour peer called it a “car crash”, adding: “We should be more careful in who we have as our candidates.”
Starmer defended his decisions on Tuesday, after a damaging 48 hours in which he had initially backed Ali before changing his mind when new recordings emerged from the meeting.
“Certain information came to light over the weekend in relation to the candidate [and] there was a fulsome apology,” he said. “Further information came to light yesterday calling for decisive action, so I took decisive action.”
The recordings all come from a single meeting in October, which sources have told the Guardian was held between Ali, Jones and a group of Labour councillors who were threatening to quit the party over its stance on Gaza.
The Middle East crisis has proved one of the most divisive issues for Labour in recent years, with many MPs, councillors and activists accusing Starmer of not going far enough in condemning Israel’s assault on Gaza.
In the latest recording, which was first reported on Tuesday by the Guido Fawkes website, Jones appeared to try to defend the Labour leader, but did so by expressing views that were condemned by Jewish Labour supporters as “appalling”.
Jones said during the meeting: “I’m sure when [world leaders] go home, like me, pardon my French [they say] ‘fucking Israel’ again.”
He went on to criticise British people who choose to fight for the Israel Defense Forces, saying wrongly that doing so was against the law.
“No British person should be fighting for any other country at all, full stop,” he said. “It is against the law and you should be locked up.”
The Jewish Labour Movement issued a statement on Tuesday afternoon saying: “Graham Jones’s comments about British-Israeli Jews are appalling and unacceptable within the Labour party.”
Jones’s suspension came a day after the party withdrew its support for Ali over comments made at the same meeting, in which he said he believed Israel had deliberately allowed the Hamas attack on 7 October to happen as a pretext for its assault on the strip.
Starmer initially backed Ali over his comments following a rapid apology from the Rochdale candidate, with one shadow minister saying Ali had “fallen for an online conspiracy theory which does not represent his view”.
But the Labour leader reversed that decision on Monday night after further details emerged from the meeting showing Ali had also blamed “people in the media from certain Jewish quarters” for the suspension of the Labour MP Andy McDonald.
While electoral rules mean Ali is technically still the Labour candidate for the Rochdale byelection later this month, the party is no longer giving him its support, meaning Labour officials and MPs will not travel to the constituency to help him.
Starmer’s supporters say there was no way the Labour leader could have known about remarks made at a private meeting long before the Rochdale byelection was called – though many are now concerned about the prospect that George Galloway, the controversial former Labour MP, will win instead.
One Labour activist said: “My guess is Galloway wins unless Labour wants to be really brave and say vote for the Tory. It’s the worst outcome.” Bookmakers have now made Galloway the favourite to take the seat.
Some have accused Starmer of fuelling factionalism within the party by acting more slowly against Ali than he has against party members on the left who have been punished for less extreme breaches over Israel.
Jamie Driscoll, the mayor of the North of Tyne, who was blocked from running again as a Labour mayoral candidate after appearing onstage with the pro-Palestinian film-maker Ken Loach – months before the Hamas attacks – said: “This all shows if you are on Team Keir you can behave how you like.”
However, others say Starmer’s actions have been fuelled not by factionalism but by his slow decision-making process and a failure of political instinct.
One Jewish Labour MP said: “In retrospect it would have been the right thing to take a bold decision on Saturday.” A senior party adviser said: “I don’t know why we ever thought we would be able to get away with claiming that one of our candidates had ‘fallen for’ a conspiracy theory he didn’t believe in.”
Some in the party are comparing the row of the last few days with the long-running saga over Labour’s plans to spend £28bn on green investment, which Starmer publicly dropped last week after weeks of reports saying he had already decided to do so.
Sue Gray, Starmer’s chief of staff, is conducting an inquiry into the source of those reports. But the inquiry itself is threatening to further exacerbate tensions within the party, with some staff members having filed a complaint about Gray’s behaviour.
