The election count for Holborn and St Pancras in 2024

AN independent candidate who has made it his mission to unseat Sir Keir Starmer in the Holborn and St Pancras constituency must wait and see if they will do battle at the ballot box again.

Andrew Feinstein made a deep cut into Labour’s majority at the 2024 General Election and was the clear challenger to the Prime Minister on his home turf.

“He was an even worse prime minister than I expected,” Mr Feinstein said this week.

“I think he is instinctively mendacious, and he went back on all of his pledges made in the party leadership campaign. People have been really angry because of the way in which he simply did very little of what was in his manifesto, and did a whole load of stuff that wasn’t.”

He added: “Obviously his attitude to the genocide in Gaza was extremely important in making him as unpopular as he’s been. As a former human rights lawyer as well, and the way in which he has been determined to suppress any sort of direct action against it. To actually corrode the legal system to the extent to which he has done, truly astonished me.”

Whether Israel’s bombing of Gaza should be defined as a genocide or not has been disputed, and it is not a term Mr Starmer or his colleagues have used.

The issue of Palestine, however, has been at the fore in both parliamentary and council elections in Camden.

Mr Feinstein, a former parliament-arian in South Africa where he worked with Nelson Mandela, said: “If you are going to govern in the interests of billionaire donors rather than the people who elected locally and nationally, this is what will happen. The benefits and general economics policies have obviously added to it profoundly.

“Added to that I’ve been astonished at how he and the people around him are so bad at politics. He was the front person for the Labour Together project. They alighted on an appalling front person. They might be extremely good at fighting internal battles, but totally inept at the day-to-day politics and governance.

“To think that he will just make it two years on that majority is really a huge indictment. It is mortifying for him.

“More and more public money has been wasted while people are enduring a cost of living crisis. I think that it is a really good thing that people are no longer tolerant of this.”

Mr Starmer saw his majority in Holborn and St Pancras drop by 20 per cent in 2024 – an election where Labour broke new ground elsewhere in the country and removed the Tories from power.

The Camden People’s Alliance was formed in the wake of Mr Feinstein’s strong showing against Mr Starmer and it won its first council seat last month Mr Feinstein said: “Starmer’s greatest failing was that after talking about unity, he has been the most factional leader in living memory of the party.

“You know, Tony Blair was brilliant at including the soft and centre left in the early years of his government. Even if I despised a lot of what he stood for, he understood the Labour Party is a coalition of forces. Starmer believed he could turn the party into a centre right party and they would get away with it, and nobody would be bothered. While it worked for one election, within weeks of being elected the extremity of divisiveness became apparent.

“There was clearly a plan to rid the party of the centre left – go with the programme, or be marginalised.”