Yahoo News Notes on a scandal: this is how Starmer’s bullies took out Jamie Driscoll – and why it matters
I first met the man who has been all over this week’s political headlines four years ago, 300 miles up the A1 from Westminster. It was a bitterly cold Saturday morning in the Northumberland coastal town of Newbiggin and Jamie Driscoll was asking for votes. He’d just caused a minor political earthquake by winning Labour members’ support to run for the new position of mayor of North of Tyne. The cert for that role had been Nick Forbes, Newcastle council leader and longtime big beast – not Driscoll, who had been a local councillor for a few months and who, on winning the selection, had had to rush out to buy his only suit.
I watched this stubbly, scruffy, upbeat outsider doorknock around an estate of small houses and exotic garden statuettes, to a reaction chillier than the wind whipping in from the North Sea. For decades, this had been Labour country, where that political tradition ran through the local economy, its institutions and people’s very identities. But over the past 50 years all that had been destroyed and now it was the land of Vote Leave, desolate and nihilistic. If residents spoke to canvassers at all, it was to spit out statements like “I don’t follow politics”.
After more slammed doors, one activist sighed: “Policy doesn’t matter here. They’ve forgotten what government can do.” For all Driscoll’s ideas and energy, I wrote at the time, his biggest challenge would be closing the vast gulf between the governed and their governors.
That tableau has come to mind many times since the Labour party barred Driscoll from standing for re-election. No more will he trigger democratic earthquakes. Instead, he has become fodder for lobby journalists. When I met him in Newcastle this week, he was slaloming between interviews for Radio 4, ITV, national newspapers, Newsnight and more. The ending of his political career has done more for his national profile than four years in office. I listened as each outlet demanded its shot of Westminster caffeine. Hardly anyone asked what it meant for the north-east, for local democracy, for the people in Newbiggin and anyone else who long ago tuned out all politicians as fraudulent liars only in it for themselves.
And why wouldn’t they? I have chased down and sifted through evidence, much of it never revealed before, and it points to a stitch-up bigger than anything on the Great Sewing Bee. The jumped-up outsider, Driscoll, has been tossed in the bin – but he is merely collateral damage in a one-sided Labour factional fight, whose actors appear not to give a damn for people’s reputations or for the public they’re meant to serve.
Let’s work backwards. Labour officials blocked Driscoll last Friday, soon after he’d been interviewed by a panel drawn largely from the party’s national executive committee. The email he received reads: “[T]he NEC panel has determined that you will not be progressing further as a candidate in this process.” But while the party gave no official reason to the candidate, its enforcers were happy to brief lobby journalists – who in turn quoted anonymous sources that it was because in March he had appeared at a Newcastle theatre with Ken Loach to discuss his films. The renowned director had been expelled as a Labour member in 2021.
On Sunday, Labour frontbencher Jonathan Reynolds told Sky News that Driscoll was excluded for sharing a platform with “someone who themselves has been expelled for their views on antisemitism” – a line swiftly amplified by the media, yet not quite true. I asked Loach’s office to forward his letters of expulsion, which say only that he is “ineligible” due to his support of “a political organisation other than an official Labour group”. That was Labour Against the Witchhunt, which did claim allegations of Labour antisemitism were “politically motivated”. Reynolds was conflating the two. I asked how many other journalists had sought clarification. The answer was one.
A column about Driscoll is not the place to litigate Ken Loach’s views, even if I disagree with much of what he says about Labour’s treatment of antisemitism. It barely needs saying that sitting on stage with a director to discuss their films does not mean you share all their opinions. Far more troubling for British democracy is how anonymous, factional briefings are simply machine-pressed into newspaper “facts” then spewed out on TV.
“They were always looking to get me,” Driscoll claimed this week. I have read emails dating back to 2020 where the new metro mayor asks Labour officials for the party’s local membership lists used by councillors, MPs and mayors as standard. But not here: IT issues meant the lists supposedly weren’t shareable. Until this year that is, when he was told the upcoming mayoral contest meant he could only access lists “if you make a confirmation that you are not seeking the selection”. Another email, sent by Driscoll last month to party officials, notes that a local constituency party has been told by a senior official to disinvite him from speaking.
Asked for comment, Labour didn’t reply – but this is petty, attritional stuff, which is what happens when politics is evacuated of ideas and arguments and becomes simply about who is in whose good books. Cliqueishness is hardly exclusive to Keir Starmer’s Labour, but it is starker now because instead of real politics all this lot have is office politics.
Which brings us back to the much-discussed NEC panel, supposedly to divine his suitability to stand. I have viewed footage of the entire hour on Zoom, which discusses nothing of Driscoll’s beliefs or achievements. Three of the five panel members are from groups on the right of the party, and all anyone wants to know is why he spoke to Loach. They refer to the director’s “controversial views” and quote the Jewish Chronicle’s coverage. How, they ask, might the event be viewed by a “hostile media”?
Driscoll replies that Holocaust denial is “abhorrent” and that he has signed up to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. He recalls how he used to fight fascists in the street. None of it is good enough.
A rather bumptious young man informs the mayor that “you can’t separate someone’s views from their work”. The twentysomething declares that Driscoll shouldn’t have discussed the films but instead attacked Loach’s politics. On that basis, Starmer ought to be disqualified for appearing with Loach on the BBC’s Question Time – and so too should the shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, who in 2019 wrote a paean in this paper to Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, praising the way it “brings across how the right to a family life has been eroded in modern Britain”.
We all know that a week is a long time in Starmer’s politics, but he did once proclaim a proud regionalism. Now what’s left?
Attacking McCarthyism, Ed Murrow told his TV audience: “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another.”
By these standards, Driscoll is a victim of McCarthyism. The office he holds is now a mere electoral toy to be enjoyed by a favoured faction. And those people in Newbiggin and Ashington and anyone else who might be looking on with half an eye will see nothing but machine politicians serving themselves. This was the swamp out of which Nigel Farage emerged.
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
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