Briefings seldom come as lurid. At least not when they concern Jeremy Corbyn and emanate from the heart of Sir Keir Starmer’s office, where caution and message discipline are valued above all else. The hard left had got the band back together, said a breathless Labour official: Corbyn’s closest aides had reunited in the office of Lutfur Rahman, the mayor of Tower Hamlets, forming an ensemble cast of Team Starmer’s pantomime villains.
Banned from politics for five years after his conviction for corrupt electoral practices in 2015, Rahman returned to haunt his former party last year. Free once more to stand in his east London fiefdom, he beat Labour and reclaimed the mayoralty denied to him by the courts. Now, this senior party official said,
