Leftwing MP says he needs another 11-13 backers to get the required number of nominations as senior party figures urge MPs to support him

The leftwing Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn has said he needs the support of another 11-13 MPs to reach the 35 nominations required to stand for the party’s leadership.

With the deadline for nominations set to expire at midday on Monday, it appears that Corbyn is going to fall short. MPs who have already nominated a candidate cannot reverse their choice at this stage.

The leadership contest is currently a three-horse race, between Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall.

Corbyn has won a small group of supporters from Mary Creagh, whose decision to drop out left her 10 backers free to side with him. Senior party figures John Prescott and Frank Field have urged MPs to nominate Corbyn, even if they do not agree with his views.



Corbyn said on Sunday: “Our party must become a social movement again. We were founded to stand up to injustice, and too often we have lost our way, sidelined our supporters or been cowed by powerful commercial interests and the press.”



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Uncertainty about Corbyn’s fate is mirrored in the deputy leadership race, where Stella Creasy, Angela Eagle, Ben Bradshaw and Rushanara Ali have until later in the week to reveal if they have reached the required threshold of nominations. The first televised debate between the candidates takes place on Wednesday evening.

The internal politicking among Labour MPs came as Cooper and Burnham set out their stalls for the leadership and Chuka Umunna, who supports Liz Kendall, called for the party to reach a new understanding of the economic errors it made before the financial crash.

He said Labour should have been running a budget surplus after 15 years of growth. He told Sky TV’s Murnaghan programme: “If you cannot run a surplus after 15 years of growth, which was the situation we were in in 2007, when can you?”

He added that Labour’s single major mistake on the economy was that at the time Treasury revenues were “too reliant on tax revenues from a frothy housing market, from the banking sector, and from taxes on city bonuses. What we failed to do was to rebalance and restructure our economy.”

He said the size of the government deficit before the crash had been small and unremarkable. But he also insisted Labour had to address the deficit issue, saying: “The fact is, unless you deal with your record, the people won’t give you permission to go to the future and frankly they won’t trust you to run the public finances again”.

Meanwhile, Burnham – who will make five speeches starting with education on Monday – said the party needed to take the best from Ed Miliband and Tony Blair, insisting that Miliband had helped the party reconnect with its working-class base. The shadow health secretary has repeatedly called on the party to rebuild its emotional connection with its supporters, but Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP for Rochdale, warned if Burnham’s leadership is about winning hearts and not minds, “the logical conclusion is that you end up with the Sheffield rally shouting ‘We are all all right’ when we are not all all right”.

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“We need more than just a nice guy. He’s about winning hearts, but I don’t think he is about winning minds. What he doesn’t have is the ability to fill the credibility gap that Labour has,” Danczuk said.



Chris Leslie, the shadow chancellor and a supporter of Cooper, criticised Burnham for saying Labour’s 2015 election manifesto had been the best of the four on which he had stood. Speaking to the BBC’s Sunday Politics, he said: “My own view is that the best manifestos are the ones that convince the public that we are the right party for government and we did not do that this time.”



He added: “We did not have as strong and consistent a message on deficit reduction on economic responsibility as we should have had throughout the last parliament. When the voters were hovering the pencil over that ballot paper, what was it that stopped them from supporting the Labour party?

“We should have been far more firm and explain that you don’t have spending commitments unless they are fully funded. We cannot just blame the media or the last-minute SNP thing. There are deeper issues: we allowed our opponents to mischaracterise our attitude to business and the wider economy.”

Cooper is due to make a speech on child poverty on Sunday, promising to end it in a generation and criticising the Labour manifesto for failing to say more about the party’s commitment to that target.