If you can vote in Rochdale, you have a choice of three candidates with Labour backgrounds in the coming by-election. There is George Galloway, the man who famously saluted Saddam Hussein’s ‘courage and indefatigability’. George used to be a Labour MP but is now the candidate of the Workers Party of Britain. Then there is Simon Danczuk. He too was a Labour MP, for Rochdale indeed. He was a scourge of paedophiles, peddling conspiracy theories about Dolphin Square, the innocent Leon Brittan etc, but – as so often with those who love hurling sexual allegations – he got tangled up himself, sending ‘inappropriate’ texts to a 17-year-old girl, and subsequently resigned. Simon says he is a reformed character, so he is standing for Reform. And there is Azhar Ali. He was Labour’s candidate until this week. Then it emerged that, at a party meeting not long after the 7 October Hamas massacres, he had declared that Israel had deliberately relaxed security so that the mass murder of Jews could provide the pretext to attack Gaza. For about a day, he was chided by Labour for this, but kept as the candidate. Then the party changed its mind and disowned him. It is too late, however, to renominate, so the ballot paper will say ‘Ali Azhar, The Labour Party’. Given the uncritical readiness to support anything with the word ‘Labour’ attached just now, perhaps this will be enough for him still to win. If, however, you want to support a Labour candidate for Rochdale whom Sir Keir Starmer endorses, you will not find one. I suppose you might want to vote Green instead, but be warned that Guy Otten, the Green candidate on the ballot paper, has also been repudiated by his own party. Admitting some disobliging social media posts about the Muslim faith ten years ago, Mr Otten says he has ‘decided to leave the stage’. Suddenly the Conservative party, though recently described by some wag as in a ‘Kemikaze’ frame of mind, looks no weirder than the opposition. Its Rochdale candidate, Paul Ellison, is a local lad who created ‘Rochdale’s Got Talent’ during lockdown, he says. I have found nothing known against him, or against the Liberal Democrat, Iain Donaldson, who has the relevant qualification that he has worked ‘as an administrator for a mental health project studying the care of people living with self-harm’. 

Labour’s Rochdale story does illustrate the immense difficulty of being the main political home of Muslim voters. In theory, it is wonderful to win the support of such a large community, but actually it is a trap. This is because there is a constant struggle for control of Muslims by those who wish to be their gatekeepers. Significant numbers of these are extremists, particularly on the Middle East and about issues in schools to do with headdresses, diet, sex segregation and curriculum. It cannot be assumed they will draw a clear line between support for the Palestinian cause and a readiness to deny or even directly applaud the Hamas atrocities. Islamists can make life extremely hard within Labour, particularly for those Muslim Labour MPs – Khalid Mahmood, Rushanara Ali – who have no truck with them. The errant Azhar Ali has a record of moderate behaviour, so the fact that he felt it necessary to endorse a classic anti-Semitic libel suggests severe pressure to appease factions within his local party. Sir Keir was completely right, on becoming leader, to reject Corbynite Jew hatred, but he may not have realised how deeply this would embroil him in struggles even more vicious than those with the Militant Tendency and others in the 1980s. All parties should seek Muslim voters. None should get too close to the voices who speak loudest in their name.

As Tony Blair’s famous Millennium Dome loomed at the turn of the century, I was editing the Daily Telegraph. At our leader writers’ conference, I canvassed views, particularly those of Bill Deedes, our former editor and by far our oldest employee. ‘Bill,’ I said, ‘you must have been to the Festival of Britain in 1951. What was it like?’ ‘Well,’ said Bill, ‘it wasn’t bad, but not half as good as the Wembley Empire Exhibition of 1924.’ This was a stunning piece of one-upmanship from Bill, 75 years on (he had attended the Wembley show, aged ten), but I bet he was right. Today, the exhibition is remembered only as the backdrop to the opening sequence of The King’s Speech, in which the future George VI wrestles publicly with his stammer. The exhibition was remarkable for its variety, with displays from 56 countries. Malta’s was a fort, Burma’s a temple. Canada produced a life-size sculpture of the future Edward VIII made of butter. The Indian restaurant was run by Veeraswamy & Co. The firm shortly afterwards opened premises of that name, the first Indian restaurant in Britain to serve a generally white clientele. It flourishes in Regent Street to this day. There should be some gathering to commemorate the exhibition’s centenary. It could teach us a lot about diversity.

Good news that British cheese now enjoys the esteem of French chefs and the judges of the World Cheese Awards (we have the most cheeses in their top 16). Although I love smelly French cheeses, I find the best British cheeses are the most satisfying. For many years, we bought a local one called Long Man, Strong Man, but it was killed off by Vladimir Putin’s energy price rises. We experimented. Eventually we narrowed it down to two cheddar-ish cheeses. One was called Tickler. The other, from Davidstow in Cornwall, is called Crackler. We chose the latter because it had more tang. I read that Crackler now graces the tables of two Michelin-starred restaurants in London. All these names suggest a traditional British robustness, as opposed to French delicacy. Oddly, they also sound like gay dating websites.