Operation DUMP on Jeremy
As John McDonnell quits and civil war erupts over Labour’s future, Red Len McCluskey and Scots pal Karie Murphy accused of turning on Corbyn in plot to keep hard-Left’s grip on party
LABOUR’S post-Election civil war escalated last night as Jeremy Corbyn’s former top aide, Karie Murphy, was accused of trying to blame him personally for the party’s historic defeat.
The Scot is said to have formed a pact with union leader Len McCluskey to make Mr Corbyn culpable for the disaster – not his extremist Left-wing policies.
Sources say the plan by the two close friends – who are normally among Mr Corbyn’s biggest cheerleaders – is designed to pave the way for another hard-Left MP to become party leader and prevent moderates from seizing back control.
The claims came as long-term Corbyn ally John McDonnell bowed to the scale of the party’s catastrophe and revealed he would stand down as Shadow Chancellor, scotching reports that he could serve as a caretaker leader.
Mr McDonnell, who will stay on as an MP, said that Labour now faced ‘a long haul’ to turn around their fortunes in the wake of the Tory triumph, saying of the current front bench: ‘We will all go now. The new leader will come in place and appoint a Shadow Cabinet. I won’t be part of the Shadow Cabinet.’
Mr McDonnell, who will leave the Shadow Cabinet when a new leader is elected, was due to hold a conference call this evening with Left-wing Momentum activists to reflect on the Election defeat.
Mr Corbyn has vowed to stand down as leader early next year but has refused to take the blame for the party’s worst General Election performance since 1935, losing 59 seats.
But supporters of Ms Murphy – a former nurse in Glasgow – and Mr McCluskey say that ‘sacrificing’ the Labour leader’s reputation would be a ‘price worth paying’ to stop his socialist dream evaporating.
However, moderate MPs condemned the tactic – dubbed ‘Operation Dump on Jeremy’ by one MP – as ‘rank treachery’ from two people who were once among Mr Corbyn’s staunchest allies.
They also claimed that former Corbyn chief-of-staff Ms Murphy, who played a key role in Labour’s campaign, cannot escape some of the blame for the party’s fourth successive General Election defeat.
But a source said Ms Murphy was determined to put blame on Mr Corbyn’s personal performance, saying: ‘Karie is now dropping Jeremy like a stone. The Left can’t possibly admit their entire project was wrong so they must dump the fiasco on to Corbyn himself.
‘The joke is, like the good Marxist he is, Jeremy will probably just quietly accept it for the sake of the collective if that means his hard-Left dream lives on.’
Ms Murphy is said to have taken personal charge of finding a new ‘Continuity Corbyn’ candidate, which could now be Salford MP Rebecca Long-Bailey after Ms Murphy’s original favourite, Laura Pidcock, lost her seat in the Tories’ Red Wall assault. The claims come after Mr McCluskey, general sec
of giant union Unite and formerly one of Mr Corbyn’s fiercest defenders, broke ranks on Friday to admit his ‘leadership became an issue on the doorstep’ and to lambast the Labour campaign for offering an ‘incontinent rush of policies which appeared to offer everything to everyone immediately’. He also condemned the ‘failure to apologise for antisemitism in the party when pressed to do so’ and suggested Labour had focused too much on their ‘metropolitan wing’ to the detriment of the party’s traditional working-class voters. Howretary ever, Mr McCluskey insisted the main policies were ‘credible and popular’ and said ‘there should be no abandonment of the core antiausterity, transformative economic and social offer Corbyn and McDonnell have championed’.
Mr Corbyn’s three sons took to Twitter yesterday to make what was interpreted as a call for Labour to keep his radical policies.
Describing themselves as the ‘three proudest sons on the planet’, Tommy, Seb and Benjamin Corbyn said their father was the most unfairly ‘smeared and vilified’ politician ever – but they insisted that ‘to assume that the ideologies he stands for now are outdated is so wrong. In the coming years, we shall see that they are more important than ever’.
But last night, moderate Labour MPs said that the hard-Left agenda, not just Mr Corbyn personally, was to blame and had to be ditched.
‘It’s also rank treachery for people to be his biggest cheerleaders one minute and then dump him the next,’ said one. Ms Murphy was
at the centre of a candidate selection scandal in Falkirk, Stirlingshire, when Unite was accused of flooding the branch with members to secure her the nomination in 2013. She withdrew and was found innocent of any wrongdoing.
Last night they both denied trying to shift all the blame on to Mr Corbyn personally.
A spokesman for Mr McCluskey said it was ‘nonsense’ to say he was trying to put all the blame on the leader, insisting Labour’s Brexit policy confusion was why it lost in so many heartland seats.