Andrew Rendle, who until last May was a Labour councillor in Ashburton ward, has publicly announced that he has quit the Labour Party.
Cheerio… Will Rendle be missed?
To suggest that Rendle is a Blairite might risk serious understatement.
His often incoherent ramblings for the past year, since he lost his position as a councillor, have tended to focus on grumblings about the party leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. During his four years on Croydon Council, Rendle was never noted as making a single murmur over the Town Hall leadership of Tony Newman, however.
In a grand gesture, Rendle announced his resignation on Friday, the morning after another Constituency Labour Party, over the borough boundary in Streatham, announced that it wanted to be more democratic and have an one-member one-vote selection of its parliamentary candidate. The MP for Streatham is arch-centrist Chuka Umanna.
In a typically virtue-signalling, look-at-me tweet, Rendle flourished a photograph of a cut-in-two Labour Party membership card and wrote: “Due to the failure to tackle AS [anti-semitism], Brexit, weak leadership, inconsistent treatment of MPs, bullying, obsession with internal party organisation, poor comms strategy and turning UK Labour into a glorified protest movement I’ve decided this isn’t the party I joined under Mr Smith.”
In the borough-wide reorganisation of wards ahead of last year’s local elections, Rendle failed to get selected in his home ward, what had become Addiscombe East, and was replaced by Caragh Skipper, a leading Momentum figure, who lost the Town Hall seat to the Tories.
Andrew Rendle: not selected
Despite strenuous efforts to get selected in another Labour-held ward, the local membership appeared indifferent to the skills and charisma that Rendle had to offer.
“He won’t be missed,” one Katharine Street figure said yesterday.
“In four years on the council, he made no impact whatsoever. He conducted his ward work well enough, but when he was made the borough’s Autism Champion, he failed to organise any meetings for more than six months because he was so busy trying to get himself re-selected.”
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