THE shutters are drawn and the mail uncollected at what should be Labour’s buzzing campaign HQ on Rochdale’s Oldham Road.
For the party’s by-election candidate Azhar Ali, the red hot favourite, has been disowned for spouting anti-Semitic bile.
Now this vote has become a grotesque political freakshow, with candidates including a conspiracy theorist, a sexter and a firebrand who pretended to be a cat on telly.
Little wonder that many in this proud Lancashire mill town are now clamouring for None of the Above in the February 29 by-election.
With driving rain blowing off the South Pennines, retired trucker John Wilson, 72, told me: “They’re as bad as each other. Whoever gets in is going to screw this country.”
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Suspended by Labour, Ali remains on the ballot paper next to the party’s red rose motif as nominations had closed when he was disciplined.
If elected, he will sit as an independent after party chiefs withdrew their support for him.
Others fighting the seat include veteran political bruiser and Celebrity Big Brother moggy impersonator George Galloway, who is campaigning to “Free Palestine”.
Then there is former Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk — now representing Reform UK — who was suspended from the Labour Party for sexting a 17-year-old.
‘Blotted copybook’
Oh, and the Green Party candidate Guy Otten has stepped down over historic, “regrettable social media posts” reportedly criticising Palestinians and “Islamic religion”.
He, too, remains on the ballot paper.
Hardly surprising, then, that many here in Rochdale feel let down by politics.
And while the war in the Gaza Strip is a key by-election issue for some, others I spoke to were worried about matters closer to home.
Dad-of-two John added: “The NHS is s**t. I hurt my ribs in a fall and waited six hours before they X-rayed me. There are no dentists. My brother went private and had a filling AT £300. But I paid into the system for 37 years. Why should I go private?”
Rochdale born and bred, John gestured to the town centre and said: “I wouldn’t want to come here at night. It’s like a thug city, full of scrotes, and you never see police.”
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Cops are currently investigating an alleged gang rape in the nearby Morrisons car park earlier this month.
Four boys, aged between 12 and 14, were arrested and bailed on suspicion of raping one girl and allegedly sexually assaulting another.
And a damning report last month found that girls were left “at the mercy” of paedophile grooming gangs for years in Rochdale because of an “inadequate” response by police and council bosses.
Businesswoman Oana Stoica, 37, is among those who won’t be voting.
She says the NHS is in such a state, she had to fly home to Romania for treatment.
The mum-of-one added: “I have a recruitment business with 25 employees here. I’m paying my taxes but you have to wait six months to be seen. The NHS is like a lottery.”
With a majority of 9,668, the by-election in Rochdale, ten miles north east of Manchester, should have been a routine slam dunk for Labour.
That was before their candidate Ali trotted out a dumb but poisonous anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
Last Sunday, it was revealed he had said Israel deliberately let Hamas massacre and rape its citizens on October 7 to pave the way for attacking Gaza.
It should have meant instant dismissal, but it was too late to remove him as Labour candidate from the ballot paper.
Incredibly, Sir Keir Starmer, overwhelming favourite to become our next Prime Minister, stuck by Ali — an avid supporter of his leader’s transformation of the Labour party.
It took just 36 hours, during which shadow frontbencher Lisa Nandy felt comfortable enough to appear at a campaign event with Ali, for Starmer to perform an abrupt handbrake turn.
Labour’s in trouble and Starmer is responsible. He lacks depth, lacks dexterity. He’s like a tinman and moves in a clumsy way, as he showed this week
George Galloway
Reports revealed Ali had opposed the suspension of another Labour MP over alleged anti-Semitism by accusing “people in the media from certain Jewish quarters” of “giving c” over the issue.
Ali was finally suspended by Labour pending an investigation.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism said of the almighty mess: “Sir Keir Starmer has blotted an otherwise fairly admirable copybook and given the public reason to doubt the earnestness of his promise to tear anti-Semitism out ‘by its roots’ in Labour.”
Now the odds-on favourite to win Rochdale is one-time Labour MP Galloway, who describes himself as “an honorary Palestinian”, a “freedom fighter” and “man of the world”.
Others will know him for mimicking a cat on 2006’s Celebrity Big Brother. In reality TV gold, actress Rula Lenska fed the firebrand a glass of milk and told him: “You’ve got cream all over your whiskers.”
Billing himself as “Gaza George Galloway’’ in his campaign literature for the Workers Party of Britain, he is hoping to appeal to the 30 per cent of Rochdale’s voters who are Muslim.
A Labour man for 36 years, Galloway was expelled in 2003 for his criticism of Tony Blair over the Iraq war.
In trademark fedora, he quickly got his claws into the current Labour leader when I met him at his bizarre Rochdale campaign HQ — a Suzuki car showroom.
Grandfather-of-four Galloway, 69, said: “Labour’s in deep trouble and Keir Starmer has a responsibility for that. He said he’d changed everything, evidently he has not.
“Starmer lacks depth but he also lacks dexterity.
“He’s like a tin man and moves in a clumsy way, as he’s demon- strated again this week.” His second-hand car dealership base only adds to the surreal nature of this election.
Galloway says: “People come in and we don’t know if they’re here to deliver leaflets or buy a Vauxhall.”
But he adds: “You couldn’t have written this script where I’m fighting in a by-election and it’s Labour imploding.”
Rochdale has moved on from the dominatrix scandal... Gaza is an issue for a small minority. The number one issue on the doorstep is illegal immigration
Simon Danczuk
The thrust of his campaign — Gaza and, he says, getting a branch of Primark in the town — has not won over everyone.
In the shadow of Rochdale’s Vic- torian gothic town hall, retired builder Dave Bowman, 64, told me: “I think the major problem here is the cost of living, not Gaza.”
But at his toys and electrical market stall nearby, Tariq Mahmood, 51, says Galloway has his vote.
The dad-of-four told me: “He’s standing up for people like us. Not many politicians, even our own, do that.
‘Fill the vacuum’
“There are problems in Rochdale but people aren’t losing their lives. They’ve got a roof over their heads, heating and food. It’s heartbreaking to see what’s happening in Gaza.”
But retired probation officer Jim Schofield, 80, said: “The Cat hasn’t got my vote. The man’s a disgrace.”
The dad of two revealed he wants to stick with Labour but “the trouble is they haven’t got a candidate now”.
Colourful ex-Rochdale Labour MP Danczuk has also entered the race.
Three times married, he was suspended by Labour in 2015, aged 49, amid revelations he sent explicit messages to teen dominatrix and drama student Sophena Houlihan.
Apologising at the time, he insisted: “I was stupid and there’s no fool like an old fool.”
In 2016 The Sun told how Danczuk had sex on his constituency office desk with a 22-year-old he had met on Twitter, now X, four days earlier. He quit Labour in 2017.
Supping a pint of bitter at the John Milne pub in Newhey, on Rochdale’s outskirts, Danczuk, 57, told me this week that he “and the people of Rochdale” had moved on from the dominatrix scandal.
And he revealed he plans to start a family with wife Coco, 30, a beauty therapist from Rwanda.
The business consultant, who has four children from his previous marriages, said of his campaign: “Gaza is an issue for a small minority of the population in this constituency.
“Probably the No1 issue is illegal immigration, it comes up on the doorstep time and again.”
Rochdale is where then Labour PM Gordon Brown labelled voter Gillian Duffy a “bigot” after she challenged him on immigration in 2010. Reform candidate Danczuk added: “Our policy is to turn the boats around like they did successfully in Australia.”
I met Tory candidate Paul Ellison, 41, in Asda’s cafe to ask about his priorities.
The dad of one — a landscape gardener — said he wants to make sure “we’ve got the money for police officers who are visible” to make Rochdale’s streets safer. Yet he does not appear an experienced enough political operator to fill the vacuum created by Starmer’s bungling.
When I asked him if he voted for Brexit, he turned to his aides for guidance before finally admitting that he did.
And after I questioned whether he was embarrassed about his Leave vote — shared by 60 per cent of his would-be constituents — he mumbled: “Sometimes, when people ask how you vote, it’s a personal thing.”
When Rochdale goes to the polls conspiracy theorist Ali’s name will be first on the list by dint of alphabetical order.
With the nation dipping into recession, the town’s by-election has become a spirit-sapping circus that gravely lets down its voters.
A bleak and shameful indictment on the state of British democracy.
