EAGLE IS SET TO SWOOP
÷ Corbyn faces challenge as Watson says party’s in peril ÷ PM tells Labour leader: For heaven’s sake man, GO!
JEREMY Corbyn will face a leadership challenge today after his deputy warned Labour will be finished as an electoral force unless he is removed.
Party sources last night said the former shadow business secretary Angela Eagle will formally announce a leadership bid unless Mr Corbyn bows to pressure to resign.
Sources said she had the support of Labour’s ‘big hitters’ and will stand as a unity candidate.
The move plunges Labour into its second leadership contest in 12 months and threatens to tear the party to pieces.
Deputy leader Tom Watson said Mr Corbyn’s refusal to quit had left the party facing an ‘existential crisis’ from which it might never recover. He also issued a public apology for the ‘mess’ Labour has become.
Despite pleas to go from Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown and even David Cameron, Mr Corbyn and his allies were last night digging in and challenging rebel MPs to take him on in a leadership contest.
Union barons threw Mr Corbyn a lifeline. In a statement, the leaders of ten major unions criticised MPs for abandoning him, saying the crisis was ‘unnecessary’.
Len McCluskey of the giant Unite union is still said to be offering Mr Corbyn ‘100 per cent support’. However, Unison and the GMB are said to have concerns over his prospects of winning a general election.
The Labour leader suffered another brutal day yesterday as the pressure to resign mounted.
Some MPs believe he is ‘looking for a way out’ but is being told by shadow chancellor John McDonnell and strategy chief Seumas Milne that his resignation would crush their dream of turning Labour into a hard-Left party.
Mr Watson, elected as Labour’s deputy leader last year, urged Mr Corbyn to resign during a tense car journey from an event in London. But Mr Corbyn refused to even discuss the situation. Mr Watson then went public with his concerns, saying: ‘My party is in peril. We are facing an existential crisis.’ He told the BBC: ‘Firstly I’d like to apologise to the country for the mess they are seeing in Westminster right now.
‘I spent the week trying to bring people together … I went to see Jeremy today to see whether we could find a negotiated settlement but he was unwilling. We are still in an impasse … He’s obviously being told to stay by his close ally John McDonnell and they’re a team and they’ve decided they’re going to tough it out. So it looks like the Labour Party is heading for some form of contested election.’
Earlier, Mr Miliband had called on Mr Corbyn to quit, saying his position was ‘untenable’.
During Prime Minister’s Questions, Mr Cameron also urged Mr Corbyn to resign, telling him: ‘It might be in my party’s interests for you to sit there but it’s not in the national interest and I would say, for heaven’s sake man, go.’
Labour MPs gave Mr Corbyn the silent treatment in the Commons, refusing to back him as he questioned the PM about the fallout from the EU referendum.
Resignations from Labour’s front bench continued. Shadow education secretary Pat Glass said she was quitting after two days in the role, and that Mr Corbyn’s position was ‘untenable’.
Former deputy leader Harriet Harman said Mr Corbyn had ‘no right or mandate’ to stay in office.
Gordon Brown said: ‘He’s going to go. He knows the parliamentary party have no faith in him.’
But Mr Corbyn’s spokesman insisted the party leader was ‘determined to do the job he was democratically elected to do’.
The spokesman said critics ‘have a simple choice as we see it – they either unite behind the leadership of the democraticallyelected leader or they trigger a leadership election’.
Mr McDonnell last night said Mr Corbyn would not be ‘bullied’. Referring to a brutal meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party on Monday, when MPs lined up to urge the leader to quit, he said: ‘It was like a lynch mob without a rope.’ But the Corbyn camp believe they retain the support of many ordinary party members.
A BBC Newsnight survey of 50 Labour constituency party chairmen found that 45 back Mr Corbyn. Patrick Smith, secretary of the Hull North branch told the programme: ‘If they don’t listen to the membership then they should just leave.’
Mr Corbyn plans to use next week’s Chilcot report into the Iraq war to point out that Miss Eagle and many of her supporters voted for the 2003 conflict, while he opposed it.
He will apologise on behalf of Labour for that vote, and is expected to call for Tony Blair to face a war crimes trial.
Corbyn ally Ken Livingstone backed the leader, saying party members would be ‘ appalled’ if he was forced out just nine months after a landslide victory.
‘We are facing an existential crisis’