There was no sign of life inside Labour’s campaign headquarters in Rochdale on Tuesday morning. With just two and a half weeks to go until the town’s key byelection, the office ought to have been a hive of activity with the party seeking to defend and perhaps even build on the 9,668 majority left by Rochdale’s last MP, Tony Lloyd, who died in January.
Instead, the shutters were down after Labour withdrew from the race and disowned its candidate in an antisemitism scandal. On Monday night, party high command ordered all canvassers to down tools. They were to knock on no more doors, take down any Labour posters and behave as if the byelection was not happening.
Not everyone got the memo: on Tuesday lunchtime the Guardian spotted a garden board exhorting voters in the Kingsway ward to choose Azhar Ali, “A strong voice for Rochdale”.
It was unfortunate timing that it was on Tuesday that households in Rochdale began receiving a leaflet from Labour with Ali’s smiling face on it. Labour had contracted the Royal Mail to deliver the literature to every house in the constituency and it was too late to cancel.
Thanks to having a surname at the start of the alphabet, Ali will still appear top of the ballot as a Labour candidate on 29 February, next to the party’s red rose logo. The deadline for him to withdraw has passed. He may even win, only to find himself in parliament as an independent MP.
Two doors down from Labour HQ at Linear Design, Shafiq Iqbal predicted a victory for George Galloway, the former Labour MP who has spent the past 19 years trolling the party by standing against its candidates – occasionally with success (Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005 and Bradford West in 2012).
“I got a kiss from George Galloway on the weekend,” said Iqbal. Galloway turned up at a fundraising event in Manchester, and Iqbal approached his table: “I said, ‘George, I love you and I love everything that you are doing, not only for the Asian community, the Muslim community, but this massive support that you give to the Palestinian people.’ I had my arm around his shoulders. He lent over and kissed me on the neck and said, ‘I love you too.’”
Iqbal has only ever voted Labour before. “Labour always would have been the party I would have voted for, and all I have voted for in all these years. But now that this seat has become available I feel George Galloway is the man to vote for. I will give him my support, as will my family and friends.”
He had heard about Ali’s defenestration, but always thought Labour was heading for defeat because of Keir Starmer’s refusal to back an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
Just 30% of Rochdale’s population are Muslim, but Iqbal believes that by capturing the vote of that community en masse, Galloway can win. “With it being a byelection I feel the other 70% may not come out as much. The Muslim community will definitely come out in large, strong numbers,” he said.
Jamie Watson, who runs the computer shop next door, said Ali had “no option to stand down”. But he thought the former Labour candidate would still win, and that he would most likely give the party his vote.
“There’s going to be a general election and I would rather see a Labour government than a Conservative government. So irrespective of my views about the candidate, and the comments he made, there’s a bigger picture. If there wasn’t a general election, it might be a different story.”
Christine, who did not want to give her last name, said she had been horrified by Ali’s remarks, leaked to the Mail on Sunday, in which he suggested Israel deliberately allowed 1,400 of its citizens to be massacred on 7 October in order to give it the “green light” for military action in Gaza.
Starmer should have sacked him on the spot, she said. “I’m not happy and I’m very glad that they have withdrawn him.” Previously a Labour voter, she said she was “now thinking of voting Lib Dem” for the first time. “I’m very dissatisfied with Labour and I’m very dissatisfied with the Conservatives,” she said.
Though Rochdale has elected Lib Dem MPs in the past, most recently in 2005, the party does not think it has a serious chance in the byelection. A party source said it did not have the resources to campaign properly in such a tight timeframe, and would “stick to our strategy of targeting Conservative-facing seats”.
It was not just Muslim voters who were concerned with the plight of the Palestinians, said Kevin Binns, a truck driver. He thought Ali should not have apologised. “If you’ve got anything to say about Israel now, the Labour party call you antisemitic, just for expressing your views – valid views,’” he said.
“I’ve been a Labour supporter all my life but I wasn’t going to vote for them this time anyway, because Keir Starmer is taking it too far to the right for me. It’s just becoming a pale imitation of the Conservative party, doing anything to get the mainstream media on side.”
Binns said he would either stay home or vote Galloway. “I don’t agree with 10% of what he says, but 90% I do agree with. He’s got an appeal to the workers. He’s very leftwing as well, whereas the Labour party now are not representing the workers any more.”
From safe Labour seat to potential Galloway citadel within the space of a week: just another chapter in the increasingly unpredictable world of UK politics.
• This article was amended on 15 February 2024. An earlier version referred to Labour having paid the Royal Mail thousands of pounds to deliver literature for a byelection. However, candidates in parliamentary elections are entitled to free postage on an election address to electors in the constituency.
