Dozens of Labour MPs are ready to follow Tristram Hunt out of politics, one of the party’s leading moderates warned this weekend.
Many are fed up with life “on the reserve bench of the reserve bench” under Jeremy Corbyn and are ready to resign, according to the former shadow cabinet minister who is playing a leading role in resisting the hard-left leadership.
Moderates could set up their own party if they were deselected by Corbyn supporters, the senior MP warned: “Deselection is the point at which you will not just get people to leave and cause by-elections to get new jobs, you will get bitterness and determination to fight back.
“So you will get people who are deselected but still MPs and they are going to set up their own competing vehicle; that is the danger if they start doing that.”
The warning came after “red” Ted Knight, the infamous former leader of Lambeth council in London in the 1980s, was a guest at a new year drinks reception thrown by the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, in parliament last week.
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Knight was barred from public office for five years after Lambeth council unlawfully refused to set a budget in 1985. His presence at the event amounted to “goading” MPs and peers who fought the “loony left” in the 1980s, a shadow cabinet source said.
Yesterday the former London mayor, Ken Livingstone, said Hunt’s departure to run the V&A Museum marked a new era for the Labour Party: “This small elite that is very much London-based that dominated the Labour Party under the Blair-Brown years and were in awe of the bankers and forgot the needs of ordinary working class and middle-class families, that era is gone.”
The appointment of Hunt, a historian, was done through an independent process signed off by Theresa May and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. A government source said it would be “tempting” to push other top jobs towards talented Labour MPs to destabilise the party, although this was probably not practical.
Many are ready to quit if the right job comes along, according to the leading rebel MP, who said Hunt could not be blamed for taking a job that would let him “actually run something, which is a million miles away from where we are. I think absolute dozens would be in that position, because you come into politics to change stuff and run things — not just to be on the reserve bench of the reserve bench.
“[Labour’s position] is getting worse. I mean, what is the solution to this conundrum? Are the members going to come to their senses? Not much likelihood of that.”
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It was still worthwhile trying to save the Labour Party from Corbyn and the hard left, the MP said, but “you don’t want to sacrifice the whole of your life to an institution that might be unsalvageable”.
Corbyn faces up to seven difficult by-elections this year after Hunt and fellow moderate Jamie Reed decided to quit parliament. Labour voters are deserting the party in droves in Reed’s Copeland seat, in Cumbria, an insider revealed. Two in five who backed Labour in 2015 are not planning to do so in that by-election, the source said.
Moderates say the task of winning has been made tougher by the Labour leadership manipulating the selection. Rachel Holliday, who has spoken about living rough and her battle with drug addiction and mental illness as a teenager, is believed to be their favoured candidate.
Ukip came second in Hunt’s Stoke-on-Trent Central constituency at the last election and voters heavily backed Brexit in last year’s European Union referendum.
• Jeremy Corbyn has dropped his longstanding opposition to Britain’s civil nuclear power industry ahead of a crucial by-election on the doorstep of Sellafield (Writes Oliver Wright).
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Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, the Labour leader denied he would be “toast” if Labour failed to hold onto Copeland in Cumbria and another by-election in Stoke-on-Trent.
But the Labour leader markedly softened his tone on nuclear power, insisting that Britain’s civil nuclear power stations would remain “for a long time” – and could even expand. In the past he has called for the decommissioning of civil nuclear power stations.
Yesterday the former Tory minister Esther McVey suggested her party should stand aside to give Ukip, who came second in 2015, the best chance of taking the seat.
In his interview this morning Corbyn insisted that both by-elections present Labour with an “opportunity”. “Our party is going to fight very hard in those elections,” he said.