Labour grandee Lord Falconer urges Jeremy Corbyn to quit if he loses next week

Labour grandee Lord Falconer yesterday warned that Jeremy Corbyn should not try to cling on as leader if the party loses the election.

He challenged union chief Len McCluskey’s claim that he should stay on to allow Labour a ‘period of reflection’.

The former lord chancellor said Mr Corbyn should resign quickly and be replaced by an ‘alternative prime minister’ ready to lead the fightback if Boris Johnson wins.

It marks the opening salvo in a new Labour power struggle between pro and anti-Corbyn factions in the event of a defeat next Thursday.

In an interview with the Daily Mail, Lord Falconer – one of the few to have served in Tony Blair’s cabinet and Mr Corbyn’s front bench team – also said the Labour leader’s ‘wrong’ Brexit stance and lack of ‘competence’ were big vote losers in its heartlands.

He said the party should not have sidelined Remainers and would-be leaders Sir Keir Starmer and Emily Thornberry, and said its next leader did not have to be a woman – even though it had never been led by a female.

Labour grandee Lord Falconer (pictured in 2017) yesterday warned that Jeremy Corbyn should not try to cling on as leader if the party loses the election

Jeremy Corbyn with hairdresser Charlotte Wilkins at Windwood Heights Retirement Village in Nottingham, while on the General Election campaign trail on Wednesday

Lord Falconer said the party should not have sidelined Remainers and would-be leaders Sir Keir Starmer (right) and Emily Thornberry (left)

Mr McCluskey said earlier this week that Mr Corbyn should not copy Ed Miliband, who plunged Labour into chaos when he resigned days after losing to David Cameron in 2015.

His comments were seen by some as an attempt to make it easier for one of two leading pro-Corbyn MPs – Rebecca Long-Bailey and Laura Pidcock – to succeed him.

One Labour source said Mr Corbyn’s allies want him to stay until the party’s conference in September to give the two hard-Left candidates time to gain enough experience to mount a serious challenge.

Left-wing magazine fails to back Labour

The New Statesman – the bible of the Left – has refused to back a Labour government for the first time in its 106-year history.

In a devastating intervention, the magazine branded Jeremy Corbyn ‘unfit to be prime minister’. Its leader column said both Mr Corbyn and Boris Johnson are ‘profoundly unpopular’ and their ‘moral integrity has been compromised’ by events in their pasts.

The journal said that ‘many voters despair at the choice before them’. It argued the Tories’ ‘weaknesses and divisions’ meant Labour had a huge opportunity and praised the party for putting forward a ‘bold manifesto’.

But it concluded: ‘The essential judgment that must be made is on Mr Corbyn himself.

His reluctance to apologise for the anti-Semitism in Labour and to take a stance on Brexit, the biggest issue facing the country, make him unfit to be prime minister.’

The magazine declined to endorse the Liberal Democrats, with the party accused of having shown ‘little intellectual ambition’.

‘Yet for the reasons outlined, we have resolved to endorse no party at this general election,’ it said.

Arguing that ‘voters deserve better’ it urged people to vote tactically next week to deprive Mr Johnson of a majority to scupper his plans for a ‘hard Brexit’.

Otherwise, it would favour the more experienced soft-Left contenders such as Sir Keir, Miss Thornberry, Angela Rayner and Jess Phillips.

Lord Falconer, 68, who stressed he still hoped Labour would triumph next week, said: ‘If we win and form a government, well and good. If we lose, we cannot afford as a party to be staring at our navel. We have to be on the pitch with an alternative prime minister.

‘If we don’t win, we need to choose a new leader as quickly as we reasonably can.’

Asked if pressure from Mr Corbyn’s supporters for him not to throw in the towel immediately was designed to boost the prospects of Miss Long-Bailey and Miss Pidcock, he told the Mail Plus ‘Order, Order’ podcast: ‘I don’t know, but I note Len McCluskey said there should be a period of reflection before we decide what to do. I just don’t think we can do that.

‘We are going to have to choose a leader who is ready.’ He said it could take until March to stage a leadership election, but ‘we cannot afford to be looking in on ourselves because so much is happening in the country’.

Lord Falconer added: ‘This election is not one where everyone can sit back and decide what is going to happen over the next decade. We will be back in parliament straightaway making decisions about the future.’

He said there would be massive changes affecting the economy, Brexit and other issues as soon as the election was over and Labour owed it to its supporters to have a strong leader in place.

Lord Falconer also disputed Corbyn allies’ claims that Labour’s next leader must be a female on the grounds it has never had one – unlike the Tories, who have had two female prime ministers.

The argument is seen by some as a means of boosting the prospects of the two pro-Corbyn frontrunners, while hindering those of the most high-profile anti-Corbyn contender, Sir Keir.

Mr McCluskey (pictured at BBC Broadcasting House last month) , who heads Labour’s biggest paymaster Unite, agreed with Lord Falconer that the party had to tackle ‘very real issues’ with Brexit and Mr Corbyn’s leadership in its heartlands

The Labour leader doing arts and crafts during a visit to Winwood Heights Retirement Village in Nottingham on Wednesday

Lord Falconer said the solution was to guarantee that if the next leader is male, he has a female deputy.

‘We have to have a woman in the leadership team,’ he said, ‘by which I mean leader or deputy leader. We could have two women but not two men.

Chairman refuses 15 times to answer for miners’ union cash

Labour’s chairman refused 15 times to explain why the National Union of Mineworkers had paid off his mortgage.

Ian Lavery was confronted by Michael Crick from Mail+ about why he had received £165,000 from the NUM which included payment towards his mortgage and a redundancy payment when he became an MP in 2010.

It came days after he featured in a campaign video by Labour that accused the Tories of ‘stealing the miners’ pension fund’.

It criticised how, when the coal industry was privatised in 1994, it was agreed that if there was surplus in the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme it would be shared between its members and the Government.

Mr Crick asked him whether he had ‘a bit of a cheek’ doing the video given the money he had received from the NUM. And he asked: ‘Couldn’t that money have been better spent on miners welfare?’ Mr Lavery replied: ‘Instead of coming here making this personal, concentrate on what the Labour Party have got to offer.’

A 2017 report from the Certification Office, which regulates unions, showed that he was lent £72,500 by the NUM benevolent fund to buy a property. It was written off in 2007. It added that Mr Lavery, the former general secretary of the NUM’s Northumberland branch, and his wife kept £18,000 from an endowment policy on the property.

The report also showed that Mr Lavery received union ‘termination payments’ of £89,887 when he left to become an MP. It said the union overpaid him £30,600 but, after a dispute, he volunteered to repay only £15,000.

‘That means it is possible for a man to become leader if the party thinks he’s the best man for the job.’

Lord Falconer said Mr Corbyn should have shared the election limelight with other key figures. ‘Labour is a broad church and the broader the church of people presenting Labour policies the better,’ he said.

‘We haven’t seen much of Emily Thornberry or Keir Starmer. They are impressive performers and it would have been good to see them.’

He added: ‘In the North and Midlands there is real concern about our Brexit policy and Jeremy Corbyn. That comes up a lot on the doorstep… and there are issues of competence.’

Lord Falconer said he feared Labour was in trouble even in strongholds such as veteran MP Dennis Skinner’s Bolsover in Derbyshire.

‘Things might change but people are voting now (in postal votes),’ he said.

Asked if it was too late for Mr Corbyn to win outright, he replied: ‘I’m hopeful, but that’s what the pollsters are saying.

‘Because we lost pretty well all our seats in Scotland in 2015 it is harder and harder for us to get a majority.

‘In these divided times where Brexit is such an issue for so many traditional Labour voters, we have got quite a struggle.

‘I am very worried that heartland Labour voters who always voted Labour in the past may not now see us as the absolute place they will go to – and the reason for that is Brexit.’

Lord Falconer said that despite his criticisms, he remained ‘totally committed to Labour’. A Corbyn victory would be ‘better for communities, keeping the UK together and having close relations with Europe,’ he added.

Mr McCluskey, who heads Labour’s biggest paymaster Unite, agreed with Lord Falconer that the party had to tackle ‘very real issues’ with Brexit and Mr Corbyn’s leadership in its heartlands.

He said Leave-voting seats in the North and Midlands were its ‘Achilles heel’.

But unlike Lord Falconer, he insisted that Mr Corbyn should not walk out immediately as leader, arguing: ‘There should be a period of reflection so there is not a knee-jerk reaction to blame A B C D or E.’