Jeremy Corbyn urged to stand down after worst UK Election defeat since 1935

Senior party figures criticise defeated Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader says he’ll remain at the helm until early next year.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn comes to terms with defeat. Picture: Getty Images

Senior Labour figures criticised Jeremy Corbyn and his election campaign as the party leader said that he would stand down early next year.

With Labour sinking to its worst election defeat since 1935, Mr Corbyn said that he was “very sad” at his dismal performance at the polls. He insisted he had “pride” in Labour’s manifesto and that he would stay on during a “process of reflection” until his successor is elected.

He said that the timetable for the contest would be up to Labour’s ruling national executive committee but that it would “be in the early part of next year”.

Mr Corbyn denied that the result was a verdict on his leadership. “It’s not Corbynism, there’s no such thing as Corbynism, the issue was Brexit,” he said. “The prime minister said he was going to get Brexit sorted. It was a mirage of nonsense … I did everything I possibly could to win this election and to bridge this divide between those who voted Leave and those who voted Remain.”

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, laid the blame at Mr Corbyn’s door. “If we are truly honest with ourselves, we knew in our hearts that Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership was deeply unpopular with the British people and that we were extremely unlikely to form a Labour government last night (Friday),” he said.

“Labour’s shocking and repeated failure to tackle anti-Semitism and our inability to put forward a credible and believable set of priorities for governing have made a major contribution to the scale of this defeat. Jeremy Corbyn has said he will stand down and this simply must now happen quickly.”

One of Mr Corbyn’s most powerful allies blamed the defeat on the party’s “incontinent rash of policies” and failure to apologise for anti-Semitism. Len McCluskey, general secretary of the Unite union, said that Mr Corbyn had focused too much on pleasing the “metropolitan wing” of the party and ignored traditional working-class voters.

In a gibe at pro-Remain leadership contenders such as Sir Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, Mr McCluskey said that a “slow-motion collapse into the arms of the People’s Vote movement” had alienated the party’s supporters in the north and Midlands of England. Yet writing for HuffPost UK Mr McCluskey insisted that Mr Corbyn’s policies were “credible and popular” and must be retained.

Sir Keir, 57, said that the result was “devastating”, adding: “It’s our duty to rebuild our party and our movement and that’s going to be a very, very big task”. He avoided the question of whether he would run for leader.

Sir Keir and Emily Thornberry, 59, the shadow foreign secretary, were understood to have texted several MPs asking for their thoughts on the party’s future, which the recipients interpreted as precursors to a leadership campaign.

Lisa Nandy, 40, who is thought be considering a run, used her victory speech in Wigan to urge Labour to listen to its former voters. “This has been a very long time coming,” she told the BBC. “We’ve been seeing lifelong Labour voters moving away from us feeling, actually, that they haven’t left Labour, that Labour has left them for nearly 20 years.”

David Lammy, 47, the MP for Tottenham and former minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, said that he was “thinking about” standing. “People like me that have been in the party for 20 years have got now to do a lot of heavy lifting to get us into the right place,” he said.

Jess Phillips, 38, also a potential candidate for leader, said it was “impossible to say anything other than” that Mr Corbyn should quit. “The country is making a clear statement about how it feels about the Labour Party,” she told Sky News.

Wes Streeting, who retained his Ilford North seat, said: “The one thing [team Corbyn] didn’t have control of was the electorate. The Labour Party is once again learning a painful lesson that hard-left politics of the sort we put forward does not survive encounters with the electorate well.

“He owns this result and the people around him and his cheerleaders own the result. But I’d just say to the new PLP [parliamentary Labour Party] there is a big collective responsibility resting on all our shoulders because we did not lose the election because of a lack of hard work from our activists.”

Dame Margaret Hodge, one of Mr Corbyn’s most vocal critics, wrote on Twitter: “Corbyn talking about a period of ‘reflection’. I’ve reflected. You failed. Please stand down.”

After the exit poll was published at 10pm on Thursday a stream of MPs began to open the door to a new leadership. Ruth Smeeth, parliamentary chairwoman of the Jewish Labour Movement, blamed the leader personally for her loss in Stoke-on-Trent North. “Jeremy Corbyn’s actions on anti-Semitism have made us the nasty party. We are the racist party,” she said.

Phil Wilson, who lost Tony Blair’s former seat of Sedgefield, said: “For the leadership to blame Brexit for the result is mendacious nonsense.”

THE TIMES