Now what about the other victims of the leadership’s factional purge?

“Keir Starmer has said that veteran MP Diane Abbott is ‘free to go forward as a Labour candidate’, in a momentous party rowback in the middle of the general election campaign,” reports Labour List.

The climbdown comes after a massive campaign to allow the Hackney North and Stoke Newington MP to stand again in the seat she has been successfully re-elected in eight times. It’s also testament to the strong stand that Diane herself has made in her own defence.

As part of the massive surge in support for Diane, a grassroots petition reached over 19,000 signatories.

Speaking on behalf of the two groups who initiated the petition – the Labour Assembly Against Austerity and Arise – A Festival of Left Ideas – Matt Willgress said, “If today’s reports are true, this is an important victory for Diane Abbott and her supporters, and shows why public and vocal campaigning for Labour Party democracy is so important.

“A key task for activists across all the left, labour and trade union movements now is to build maximum opposition to further stitch-ups, and call for the re-instatement of Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Faiza Shaheen as Labour candidates.”

A Momentum spokesperson agreed, saying: “Starmer’s appalling treatment of Diane is just one case among many. Faiza Shaheen should now be reinstated as the Labour candidate in Chingford and Woodford Green, as members voted.”

NEC member Jess Barnard tweeted: “This shameful episode should be a lesson to Starmer and those around him, the British public will not turn the other cheek to nasty bully boy tactics.”

By apparently deciding the matter, Keir Starmer has contradicted his own claims that the process determining Diane Abbott’s future was independent of himself. “First we were told the investigation into Diane was ongoing – it wasn’t,” tweeted Momentum. “Then it was an independent process nothing to do with Starmer – it wasn’t. Then it was a matter for the NEC, nothing to do with Starmer – it wasn’t.”

The attempt to block Diane Abbott may have spectacularly backfired but other MPs and candidates remain blocked. There is now widespread recognition that Labour officials close to the leadership are engaged in a factional purge in the middle of a general election campaign which Labour cannot afford to lose.

Among the many calls for these factional manoeuvres to stop is a letter form the cross-party campaign group Compass, signed by the former Labour minister Clare Short, former senior Labour adviser Andrew Fisher and the former Labour MP John Austin.

The letter reads: “To win elections and to govern the country effectively Labour must be a broad church. This is how it won and governed in 1945, 1964 in 1997. At this critical election juncture, the suspension of candidates on the most dubious grounds is not only wrong, it is counter-productive.”

Meanwhile Faiza Shaheen fights on. She has issued a full statement detailing her treatment. She has also tweeted:  “People are asking so here are some of the tweets that were used against me and that I had to answer for in my NEC panel meeting earlier this week. They’ve briefed a different story about what happened, but they wanted me out and used very thin grounds to do it.”

Tonight there is a rally in support of Faiza in her constituency. Come and show your support.

Main image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Diane_Abbot_MP,_Labour_Party_UK.jpg. Author: Sophie Brown, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.