The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Corbyn to quit if Labour loses election
Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell would stand down if Labour loses the next election, the shadow chancellor has said.
He made the comments in an interview with Alastair Campbell for GQ magazine.
Mr McDonnell said a woman should take over from the current leader and named shadow education secretary Angela Rayner as a possible successor to Mr Corbyn.
Despite discussing the process for replacing Mr Corbyn, the Labour number two said the opposition party could “win a majority”.
Mr McDonnell said Labour could win a fresh poll outright but, should an election produce another hung parliament, his party would not strike any deals or form a coalition.
If working as a minority government fails, then he said Labour would request an immediate return to the polls.
The 68-year-old said it “doesn’t matter” what comes first between either a general election and a second Brexit referendum and vouched that the party had overcome its problem with antiSemitism.
He warned that Boris Johnson’s style of leadership was “unleashing forces” in the country that were “really worrying”.
Mr McDonnell said he found it “very difficult to see anything between” the Conservative Party leader and US president Donald Trump.
“Johnson needs to understand and be worried about the forces he’s unleashing,” he told GQ.
“When you go into that political climate where actually you are lying through your teeth, and when you’ve got a crony media in large sections of it, you have the potential then of unleashing forces that you lose control of.
“I think we’re on the edge of that.” He told Mr Campbell how Nazi swastikas and a sign saying “Leave means Leave” was sprayed on a nursery in his London constituency after the Daily Mail “did a number” on him.
“We’ve not had that in this constituency in maybe 40 years.
“Those are the sorts of forces Johnson risks unleashing and I think he needs to realise the dangers there are in that,” he said.