LABOUR IS ‘MAROONED ON FANTASY ISLAND’
FORMER PM WARNS PARTY’S FUTURE IS AT RISK
CONTENDERS for the Labour leadership began jostling to replace Jeremy Corbyn yesterday as Tony Blair warned the party was marooned on “fantasy island”.
Emily Thornberry, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, became the first candidate to confirm she is in the race.
Others including shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer and Wigan MP Lisa Nandy have signalled they are considering a bid.
Key Corbyn ally Rebecca Long-Bailey is the choice of the current leadership and former minister Yvette Cooper has said she might take a tilt.
The moves came as former Labour PM Blair compared Corbyn’s Labour with a football team “where the striker was directionally oblivious, its midfield comatose, the defence
BY TORCUIL CRICHTON Westminster Editor absent in the stands chatting to a small portion of the fans and its goalkeeper behind the net retweeting a clip of his one save in a 9-0 thrashing.”
Despite Corbyn insisting the General Election result was only about Brexit, Blair claimed the leadership was “decisively rejected” and it was a “delusion” that the manifesto was popular.
Polls show the policies had wide support but Blair said: “Any fool can promise everything for free. But the people weren’t fooled.”
Blair, a Remainer, accepted the EU issue was
“settled by the election”, adding: “Now that Brexit will happen we must make the best of it.” The only Labour leader to have won a general election in the last 45 years added: “I believe with different leadership we would have kept much of our vote in traditional Labour areas.” Thornberry set out her pitch by revealing that she warned Corbyn it would be an act of “catastrophic political folly” to back last week’s doomed election. The Remainbacking MP for Islington South and Finsbury was highly critical of the Labour leadership for backing Boris Johnson’s call for an election to break the
Brexit impasse. She said: “I wrote to the leader’s office warning it would be an act of catastrophic political folly to vote for the election and explained exactly why we should not go along with it.”
Starmer confirmed he was “seriously considering” his own run a day earlier as he warned Labour must not “oversteer” away from the left-wing politics of Corbyn.
In a clear attempt to distance himself from the legacy of Blair, he said the party could not afford to go back to “some bygone age” and backed its current “anti-austerity” stance.
Former Cabinet minister Cooper, who unsuccessfully stood against Corbyn in 2015, suggested the party needed to move away from the politics of both Corbyn and Blair. She said: “We can’t become a party concentrated in cities, with support increasingly concentrated in diverse, young, fast-moving areas while older voters in towns think we aren’t listening to them.”
A new SNP MP crossed his fingers during the oath to the Queen as he was sworn in at the House of Commons. Steven Bonnar, the MP for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill, tweeted a pic of the moment – with his hand cropped out.