Red Ed could slink back to Labour’s front bench
ED Miliband could return to frontline politics following Jeremy Corbyn’s extraordinary poll results, Labour sources said last night.
The former leader is the most senior of Mr Corbyn’s critics thought to have offered his services – despite having once described his successor’s leadership as ‘untenable’.
Yvette Cooper, who until the close of polls at 10pm on Thursday night was preparing a leadership challenge, has also said she would consider a return if she was offered the job of shadow home secretary.
Chuka Umunna, another moderate who abandoned a bid to replace Mr Corbyn, hinted he would like to come back, too.
Yesterday, a confident Mr Corbyn insisted he could still become prime minister as he laid out plans to put forward an alternative Queen’s Speech.
Foreign spokesman Emily Thornberry even claimed Labour had won the election – despite clocking up dozens of seats fewer than the Tories – and accused Theresa May of ‘squatting in No10’.
Len McCluskey, the hard-Left leader of the Unite union, tore into ‘treacherous’ moderates who tried to ‘knife’ Mr Corbyn in the back.
But the Labour leader’s language was conciliatory, and he insisted he was ‘open to everyone’.
With one poll yesterday putting Labour six points clear of the Conservatives, Mr Corbyn said he wouldthis Mr year Miliband welcomeor early decided anotherin 2018. to electionresign after losing the 2015 election, allowing Mr Corbyn to snatch the leadership that September. For the first year, Mr Miliband kept his counsel – apart from tell- ing a Labour MP: ‘I bet you didn’t think things would get worse.’
Last year, however, he joined the attempted coup against the hardLeft leader, saying his position was ‘untenable’ after the Brexit vote.
But he is now among other moderates admitting they were wrong after Mr Corbyn gained a 40 per cent share of the vote and denied Theresa May a majority.
Mr Miliband set the seal on his change of heart on Friday, when he tweeted: ‘Congratulations to Jeremy Corbyn for his inspired campaign. He showed people a vision of a fairer society and millions voted for change.’
Labour added 3.5million votes to his 2015 tally in the sharpest increase since the Second World War. Last night, a Labour source said a frontline return for Mr Miliband could not be ruled out.
Yesterday, Mr Corbyn told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show he had received text messages from party colleagues across the spectrum.
‘It’s important to make that clear,’ he said. ‘I never get involved in personal abuse. If people have political disagreements, that’s fine. We can discuss those. I’ll be appointing a shadow cabinet over the next couple of days and announcing it next week.’
John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, said: ‘The general view has always been an open- door policy, and we’ve wanted people to work with us all the way along.
‘My view is we want to draw upon all the talents – but our shadow cabinet at the moment was a winning team. It’s just won, effectively, votes that no one predicted we would, so I don’t want to break up that winning team.’
In an interview with the Sunday Mirror, Mr Corbyn said: ‘I can still be prime minister. This is still on. Absolutely. We will obviously amend the Queen’s Speech. There’s a possibility of voting it down – we’re going to push that.’
Mr McCluskey said Mr Corbyn would be in No10 now were it not for attacks from his own MPs.
He told BBC Radio 5 Live’s Pienaar’s Politics: ‘Instead of constantly having to be defending himself against treacherous individuals, he’ll be able to concentrate even more on what this nation needs. Many of the MPs who have been knifing him in the back owe their jobs to him.’