• ON July 4 the Holborn and St Pancras electorate could do the rest of us a favour by ensuring that when Labour wins it does so without returning to parliament its present leader.

Yet Sir Keir Starmer is an honourable man.

OK, he did notoriously break every one of the 10 pledges on which he was elected leader. But he’s an honourable man.

He once extolled the virtues of Faiza Shaheen and subsequently blocked her candidacy with a risible explanation. But he’s an honourable man.

And long after praising Jeremy Corbyn to the rafters in the 2019 election campaign (the basis for that toe-curling encounter with Fiona Bruce in the BBC Question Time election special) he was still proclaiming: “Jeremy Corbyn is my friend as well as a colleague.” But he’s an honourable man.

No wonder Andrew Feinstein, once an MP in South Africa’s Nelson Mandela-led parliament, has shot from nowhere to second in the betting odds for Holborn and St Pancras.

Without drawing any comparisons, Feinstein never has to explain a conflict between what he says one day and what he says another, because he is unswervingly consistent.

He would run weekly in-person surgeries in the constituency; he would fight for his electorate unconstrained by party discipline; and he would bring to parliament a world view informed by his widely respected researches into the arms trade and corruption in international affairs.

As for the burning topic of the day, Zionism and the Middle East, Feinstein is better placed than most of us to recognise apartheid when he sees it.

I am old enough to remember Hampstead Labour Party trying, but failing, to expel Hugh Gaitskell when he was the national party leader. The voters in Holborn and St Pancras have a chance to do better than that.

PETER KIRKER, W1