Former ousted leader Arooj Shah has staged a political comeback to return to head up Oldham council after winning an internal Labour contest.
Ms Shah had previously served as leader after the defeat of Sean Fielding in May 2021, but was herself beaten in the election the following year in Chadderton South ward. In the all-out election this year in which all 60 seats went to the polls she stood in St Mary’s ward and won first place, guaranteeing her four years in office, with 2,743 votes.
She will take over the leadership from Amanda Chadderton, who was struck with the same curse of losing her seat following a year heading up the authority. However Labour narrowly retained a majority on Oldham council, with 32 seats.
At the Labour party annual general meeting on Tuesday night (May 9) Ms Shah faced off with fellow returning councillor Peter Davis, who had also won back a seat in the town hall in Failsworth West after previously losing to new hyperlocal party, the Failsworth Independents.
A majority of members backed Ms Shah to once again become leader of the group, and consequently the council. During the election count on Friday (May 5) several key people within Labour told the Local Democracy Reporting Service they felt she deserved a second chance at delivering on the priorities established during 2021.
In her pitch to colleagues, she pledged to find a way to save a producing theatre in Oldham following the closure of the iconic Coliseum Theatre earlier this year. She also prioritised cleaning up the streets, saying the Don’t Trash Oldham campaign would now expand to include ‘greening’ the borough with trees, plants and investing in parks.
Among her other pledges were the return of district community councils, and building on the economic review commissioned during her previous tenure. Following confirmation of her election as group leader Ms Shah said: “If politics isn’t seen as a force for better, something to believe in and something to vote for, all that’s left is the politics of division, where faced with little else voters vote against how things are, not what can be.”
She had been the first Muslim woman in the north of England to become a council leader in 2021, but her historic first stint in office was not plain sailing. In July of 2021 her car was fire-bombed outside her home in Oldham. She told a council meeting she had been physically threatened, and faced ‘regular’ death threats.
Ms Shah also faced public criticism of her links to childhood friend Mohammed Imran Ali, or ‘Irish Immy’, who was convicted in 2013 for assisting Dale Cregan by driving him to Leeds after his murder of gangland rival David Short in 2012.
In December 2021 she stood up in the council chamber to put her relationship with Ali on the record after it had become the subject of intense speculation on social media, saying: “I can condemn their individual and personal choices but I can’t condemn them as people. And that is something that I’ve been really honest and open about. I’d like to be judged by my own standards, by my own conduct.”
She will be the third councillor to serve two separate stretches as leader of Oldham council, following Labour’s Joseph Hilton and the Conservative leader Geoffrey Webb.
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