Robert Peston Robert Peston

Keir Starmer has shown he’s serious about winning power

Keir Starmer (photo: Getty)

It’s not as though Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t put on warning.

Well he would have been put on warning, if he had bothered to wait even five minutes before putting out his own statement in response to the EHRC verdict that Labour on his watch had made ‘serious’ failures in tackling anti-Semitism. Because his successor Sir Keir Starmer said in a prepared statement at 11.05 am that anyone who thought that verdict was ‘all exaggerated or a factional attack… should be nowhere near the Labour party’. Just a few minutes earlier Jeremy Corbyn had said ‘the scale of the problem was… dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media’. How could Starmer not suspend Corbyn given what they both had said?

And for all that this is momentous, it is also comic that Starmer had dug his enormous bear trap only to find that Corbyn had dived headfirst into it just as he was shouting ‘watch out!’.

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Robert Peston
Written by
Robert Peston
Robert Peston is Political Editor of ITV News and host of the weekly political discussion show Peston. His articles originally appeared on his ITV News blog.

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