British cheese… or gay dating website?

If you can vote in Rochdale, you have a choice of three candidates with Labour backgrounds in the coming by-election. There is George Galloway, the man who famously saluted Saddam Hussein’s ‘courage and indefatigability’. George used to be a Labour MP but is now the candidate of the Workers Party of Britain. Then there is Simon Danczuk. He too was a Labour MP, for Rochdale indeed. He was a scourge of paedophiles, peddling conspiracy theories about Dolphin Square, the innocent Leon Brittan etc, but – as so often with those who love hurling sexual allegations – he got tangled up himself, sending ‘inappropriate’ texts to a 17-year-old girl, and subsequently resigned. Simon says he is a reformed character, so he is standing for Reform. And there is Azhar Ali. He was Labour’s candidate until this week. Then it emerged that, at a party meeting not long after the 7 October Hamas massacres, he had declared that Israel had deliberately relaxed security so that the mass murder of Jews could provide the pretext to attack Gaza.