The day Tom Watson almost convinced Corbyn to resign

TOM WATSON, the deputy Labour leader, brought Jeremy Corbyn to the brink of quitting as party leader in July 2016, only for the launch of Angela Eagle’s leadership challenge to change Mr Corbyn’s mind.

Mr Watson arranged to meet Mr Corbyn after the Labour leader suffered an overwhelming but non-binding defeat in a vote of no confidence by his MPS and had refused to resign. Mr Corbyn cited his support among the party membership, whom he would not “betray”.

The story of the meeting between Mr Watson and Mr Corbyn is told in a new book, Ten Years in the Death of the Labour Party, by Tom Harris, a former Labour minister and a shadow cabinet minister under Ed Miliband.

Extracts from the book – exclusive to The Daily Telegraph – also tell the story of how Shami Chakrabarti became the only new Labour peer in 2016 because she was the single name Mr Corbyn could remember off the top of his head during a call from David Cameron.

In early July 2011, following the success of the Leave campaign in the EU referendum and with Labour far behind in the polls, Mr Corbyn had 172 of his 229 MPS vote against his continued leadership. At this point Mr Watson stepped in.

As Mr Harris writes: “Watson was, above all else, a deal maker. And in the week following the vote of no confidence, he tried to do a deal with Corbyn.”

Mr Corbyn’s team were reportedly wary of the deputy leader and “at one point, a request from Watson for a private one-on-one with his leader was rejected because Corbyn’s staff feared Watson might end up ‘bullying’ Corbyn into doing something he might later regret”.

They did meet though, and “a reliable source” close to Watson insisted that the leader did, in fact, seriously consider stepping aside at Watson’s request: “He only changed his mind because Angela Eagle announced she was standing against him and that decided it for him.

“If she’d just waited until Tom had done his job, he might have gone.”