Shami Chakrabarti has hinted she may quit the Labour frontbench if Ken Livingstone is not expelled from the party at his next disciplinary hearing.



The shadow attorney general, who authored a report on dealing with antisemitism and racism in the party, said she did not believe there were circumstances where the party’s disciplinary panel could decide not to expel Livingstone.

The former mayor of London, who is suspended from the party after comments he made about Adolf Hitler’s support for Zionism, is expected to face his latest disciplinary hearing within three months.

“I’m sorry to say it but I don’t believe that Ken Livingstone can any longer be in the Labour party,” Chakrabarti said when asked about Livingstone’s case on the BBC’s Sunday Politics.

She said she would have to “look at the rationale” before deciding how to respond, when asked if she would step down from the frontbench, but said she found it “very difficult to see that any rational decision-maker in the light of what has happened in the last two years could find a place for Mr Livingstone in our party at this moment”.

Chakrabarti is the latest senior member of the shadow cabinet to break ranks to call for Livingstone’s expulsion, including Emily Thornberry and Nia Griffith. Jeremy Corbyn has said the party’s disciplinary process must be allowed to take its course without interference.

Separately, the frontrunner to be Labour’s candidate in Lewisham East, Phyll Opoku-Gyimah quit the race. Opoku-Gyimah, the head of equality at the PCS union, said “the unexpected happened” despite preparing to launch her campaign on Sunday. “It has not been an easy or happy decision for me not to put myself forward so I ask for my privacy at this time,” she said in a statement posted on Twitter.

Comments by Opoku-Gyimah comparing the Israel-Palestinian conflict to the Holocaust were unearthed by the Guido Fawkes blog at the weekend.

Labour chiefs have delayed the Lewisham East selection meeting, a move the party said was to give the chance for more candidates to put themselves forward and give more activists the opportunity to attend the selection meeting.



Acting regional director Neil Fleming said the NEC had taken the decision “after listening to feedback from members and in a desire to ensure members get more time to consider who our candidate should be once the shortlist is published”.

Ian McKenzie, the chair of the local party, had written to local members urging them to complain to the party’s HQ about the snap timetable, which gave the party just six days to choose a candidate to replace Heidi Alexander, who stepped down from the seat to join Sadiq Khan at City Hall.

The shortlist for the seat, which has a 21,000 Labour majority, will be announced early this week, widely expected to be an all-female, minority ethnic shortlist.

The party’s parliamentary selection process has come under scrutiny in recent days. It emerged over the weekend that Labour has dropped another newly selected parliamentary candidate amid allegations of financial mismanagement.

Tara-Mary Lyons, selected to fight the marginal seat of Welwyn Hatfield, was selected by the local party but was not endorsed by Labour’s national executive committee, after concerns were raised with the party about money owed to both HMRC and suppliers by two businesses.

On Friday, Labour was forced to cancel another hustings for parliamentary candidates in Shoreham after Labour’s national executive committee vetoed a plan by the local selection panel to drop Unite-backed Sophie Cook, who would have been Labour’s first trans women in a winnable seat.

After concerns about her business dealings were raised, Cook was reinterviewed by the local selection panel who decided to drop her from the shortlist, but were overruled by the NEC. The two other shortlisted candidates have since dropped out in protest.

Another candidate, Fiona Derbyshire, stood down as the candidate for York Outer, telling the York Press that politics had been “a lot bloodier than I thought”.

The incidents will raise further questions about Labour’s vetting of candidates and the speed with which candidates have been selected for target seats, given a general election could be four years away.

The need for a vigorous process was underlined recently by the case of Mandy Richards, the candidate for Worcester who was chosen despite being placed under civil restraint by the high court for a series of reported “false and vexatious claims”. Her selection was not endorsed by the NEC and she was deselected.

Richard Angell, the director of Labour’s centrist pressure group, Progress, said: “Labour needs to treat party selections like they are deciding which future cabinet minister is to represent which local community and stop using it a volunteer opportunity or redundancy plan.”