Simon Danczuk, the former Labour MP who was suspended from the party for sending explicit messages to a 17-year-old girl, is standing in the Rochdale byelection for the Reform party. He looks likely to face George Galloway, another former Labour MP, who said he would stand on a pro-Palestine ticket to “teach Starmer a lesson”. Labour’s candidate is Azhar Ali, the leader of the Labour group on Lancashire county council, who has called for an “immediate” ceasefire in Gaza, going further than the Labour leadership. The byelection will be held on 29 February after the death of Tony Lloyd last month. Labour decided to hold the contest as quickly as possible to “ensure a vacuum isn’t created for George Galloway and his circus of division”, as one party insider put it. Danczuk, 57, was Labour MP for Rochdale from 2010 until 2017 but was blocked from standing in the snap election called by Theresa May in 2017 after a series of lurid tabloid scandals. The final straw for Labour high command came in 2016 when he was exposed as having sexted a teenage dominatrix who “sold her toenail clippings for £10”. The teenager in question had apparently contacted Danczuk about a job in his office as she was interested in a career in politics. Talking on Thursday from Rochdale’s Baum pub, Danczuk said the portrayal of him as a “sex shame MP” was “absolute nonsense, a tabloid creation”. He added: “The real reason that I wasn’t allowed to stand for Labour in 2017 is because I was, as described by the Financial Times, Jeremy Corbyn’s fiercest critic.” Describing himself as “old Labour”, he said that the party under Keir Starmer had gone from “work to woke”. He said Reform’s policies appealed more to him, particularly “stopping the boats and illegal immigration and coming out of the European convention on human rights”. Danczuk hopes his record as a campaigner against grooming in Rochdale will stand him in good stead in the contest. Last month an independent review found that the police and local Labour-run council left vulnerable young girls “at the mercy of their abusers”. In 2012 he spoke out about the racial element of a series of sex-grooming cases in Rochdale, in which gangs of Asian men were found guilty of exploiting vulnerable white girls. In November that year, he gave a speech in parliament in which he outed Cyril Smith, Rochdale’s Liberal MP for 20 years, as a prolific paedophile. Danczuk said he joined Reform three months ago with no particular aim to be an MP again but that “the stars aligned” for him to return to Rochdale. He still has a home in the Greater Manchester town, where he stays when seeing his teenage sons. But he lives largely in London now, with his new wife, Claudine Uwamahoro, a beauty therapist from Rwanda. Standing as an independent in the 2017 general election he polled just 883 votes to Lloyd’s 29,035. Galloway came third in a byelection in Batley and Spen in 2021, polling 21.9% of the vote in a brutal contest in which his supporters were accused of aggression and intimidatory tactics.