If Labour loses the Batley and Spen by-election, Keir Starmer will survive

George Galloway is standing in the by-election to get rid of the Labour leader. John Rentoul asks how real the threat is

Kim Leadbeater, Labour’s candidate in Batley and Spen, says she is ‘the candidate the Tories are afraid of’ (Getty Images)

Sir Alan Campbell, Labour’s chief whip, is so new to the post that his Twitter account still describes him as the deputy chief whip, two and a half weeks after Keir Starmer became the third Labour leader to sack Nick Brown in order to assert his authority over his MPs (after Tony Blair in 1998 and Ed Miliband in 2010).

Sir Alan made his first appearance at the dispatch box in his new role yesterday, when he moved the writ for the by-election in Batley and Spen, the seat vacated by Tracy Brabin, who has been elected mayor of West Yorkshire. The convention is that the party previously holding the seat gets to decide the date of the by-election, and Starmer has gone for 1 July.

There is no good time for Labour to hold this by-election. Starmer’s mistake was to allow Brabin to run for the West Yorkshire mayoralty in the first place, but now that a by-election has to be held, he has decided that it might as well be sooner than later.