Head to head: The two women tipped for the top if Corbyn goes
TWO female politicians tipped for Labour’s top job have refused to rule out contesting the leadership.
Rebecca Long-Bailey, the party’s business spokesman, piled pressure on Jeremy Corbyn yesterday as she suggested he should go if Labour loses at the next election.
And prominent backbencher Jess Phillips said this weekend she ‘might’ stand to replace him if he resigns.
It comes as Mr Corbyn has refused to say if he will stand down.
Last week his ally, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, said he expected the pair would quit if they lost. But yesterday Mr Corbyn contradicted him, telling Sky News: ‘We are not expecting to lose the next election. It is a hypothetical question. It is up to the members of our party to decide who the leader is.’
Yesterday Miss Long-Bailey told BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show: ‘It’s right for John to say in the event of us losing a general election they would stand aside.’
And asked at the Cheltenham Literature Festival whether she would run for the top job, Mrs Phillips said: ‘Might do, yes. The answer is I genuinely don’t know. I’d have to see how the land lay.’
REBECCA LONG-BAILEY, 40 MP for Salford and Eccles
■ Elected in 2015, she was an early supporter of Jeremy Corbyn
■ Once cruelly nicknamed as ‘Rebecca Wrong Daily’ after robotic media performances
■ Her trade unionist father was a Salford docker, unloading oil from tankers at a Shell refinery
■ Her first job was in a pawnbroker in Ellesmere Port where she says she learned the ‘struggles of life’
■ She studied to be a solicitor and is married with one child
■ John McDonnell has praised her ‘convincing commonsense answers’
JESS PHILLIPS, 38 MP for Birmingham Yardley
■ Elected in 2015, she nominated Yvette Cooper for leader
■ Has four tattoos, including the Chinese symbol for courage
■ She left the Labour Party when Tony Blair was in charge
■ Before becoming an MP, she worked for Women’s Aid managing refuges for domestic abuse victims
■ Married with two children
■ She once threatened Mr Corbyn, saying: ‘The day... you are hurting us more than you are helping us, I won’t knife you in the back, I’ll knife you in the front’