Interesting to see Ruth Smeeth and Lee Harpin spring to Keir Starmer’s defence over the use of Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a backdrop for a social media video, with Harpin calling criticism an attempt “to manufacture a political row.”

1/9 A different line was taken in 2019 when Smeeth stormed out of a meeting of Labour’s MPs accusing the party leadership of failing to “even get the dates of the Holocaust right”.

She left the meeting in what looked like tears & briefed journos waiting in the corridor outside. 2/9

If your sole aim were to make Keir Starmer PM, you’d take the programme and political positioning of the 2017 campaign as your base to refine and expand. But Keir Starmer and his team aren’t doing that. Instead they ignore 2017, loudly attack the party’s left and hark back to Blair.

Why?

I tried to answer that question in a @LabourOutlook event.

First, what does team Starmer and the Labour right think they’re doing? 👇

The below is my experience of self-styled whistleblower Sam Matthews' commitment to and competence in dealing with cases of antisemitism in the Labour Party.

Some journalists writing Labour antisemitism stories were aware of this but didn't include it in their reporting. On the morning of 7 March 2018, the Telegraph’s political editor @gordonrayner called me and alerted me to David Collier's report on the Palestine Live Facebook group. Rayner was seeking confirmation of the veracity of the contents of the report and comment from Labour.