Jeremy Corbyn has strengthened his grip on the Labour party after Scottish members elected a leftwing trade unionist, Richard Leonard, as their seventh leader in the past decade.

Announced as the winner in front of cheering supporters in Glasgow, Leonard won a decisive victory over his rival Anas Sarwar, a former Scottish deputy leader, after a fractious contest between the party’s left and right wings in which the Unite union played a significant role.

Corbyn remained silent during the campaign despite open support for Leonard from his allies, but he said on Saturday Leonard’s victory was a turning point in Scottish politics and would transform the party’s fortunes.



“Richard’s campaign has offered a challenge to the rigged system that has benefited a wealthy elite and showed how he will lead Scottish Labour to transform society,” Corbyn said.

Labour’s popular support in Scotland has nearly doubled this year, from 13% last winter to 27% in June’s general election where it gained six Westminster seats.

But Leonard’s victory, with nearly 57% of the vote, was overshadowed by a bitter row inside the party over the decision by Kezia Dugdale, the former Scottish Labour leader, to appear on the ITV reality show I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! next week.

With Dugdale’s allies openly attacking her decision, party sources confirmed she faced disciplinary sanctions because she had failed to seek approval from party business managers to be out of the UK. She will donate her MSP’s salary to charity, but one ally said he was “pretty horrified” by her decision.

Leonard said he supported a bill barring MSPs from second jobs but his initial reaction was not to suspend Dugdale. He said the Labour group at the Scottish parliament needed to consider what action to take. “I was a bit disappointed,” he said of his reaction to the news.

Corbyn said on Saturday that Dugdale should not be suspended from the party for appearing on the reality show.

Jenny Marra (@JennyMarra) Election to parliament is a privilege to serve and represent people. It’s not a shortcut to celebrity. https://t.co/SrcA6h1gxz

It added to an unrelated crisis for the new Scottish leader after his deputy leader, Alex Rowley, was suspended by the party last week when it emerged police had told him in October of abuse complaints against him by a former partner.

Widely disliked by Sarwar’s supporters, Rowley had backed Leonard’s leadership campaign while serving as interim leader; his daughter Danielle Rowley, a recently elected Labour MP, chaired Leonard’s campaign.

Corbyn’s allies in Scottish Labour are nonetheless celebrating a significant victory for the party’s leftwing. Scottish members have traditionally rejected the left, backing centrist candidates in previous leadership contests and voting last year for Owen Smith when he challenged Corbyn for the UK leadership.

Against Sarwar, Leonard won both the trade union affiliates vote by a resounding 77% to 23% and the membership vote by 52% to 48%. A membership drive orchestrated by Unite, which backs Corbyn, pushed up Scottish Labour’s membership to 35,000. Turnout in the ballot was 62%.

Although Leonard has resisted being pulled into the Campaign for Socialism, a 23-year-old grouping inside Scottish Labour that vigorously backed his candidacy and also backs Corbyn, his victory gives Corbyn more clout on Labour’s ruling national executive committee.

In a reform pushed through by Dugdale, the Scottish and Welsh party leaders are automatically given seats on the NEC.

Leonard acknowledged his immediate task was reuniting the party after a bruising contest that exposed factional divisions within the Scottish party. Despite winning the support of a majority of trade unions, he commanded only a handful of votes among Labour MSPs.

He described Sarwar, whose leadership campaign was hit hard by attacks on his £4.7m shareholding in his family’s cash and carry business, and for sending his children to a fee-paying school, as a “friend and a comrade”. He said Sarwar was too talented and experienced not to get a frontbench post at Holyrood.

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“The party will, in my view, come together because we have no choice. We are in third place [in Holyrood]. We do not have the luxury of continuing splits and divisions. In any leadership contest, there is a debate of ideas, there is a debate about direction, and that is what we have seen,” Leonard said.

“One of the things that has emerged in the course of this long nine-week campaign is a new consensus around where the Labour party needs to sit politically … which is about extending public ownership, which is about ending austerity, which is about investing in public services and which is about seeing a shift in power from the few to the many.”

Sarwar said he would happily serve in Leonard’s team at Holyrood. “This was clearly not a referendum on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership but now we have the result I give my full and unswerving support to Richard Leonard,” he said.