Labour strategists are planning to relaunch Jeremy Corbyn as a leftwing populist in the new year, as the party seeks to ride the anti-politics mood in Brexit Britain and narrow the gap with the Tories.

While the Islington North MP’s politics are very different from those of Nigel Farage or Donald Trump, senior Labour figures believe his unpolished authenticity could help the party draw on the wave of anti-establishment feeling sweeping through politics.



Corbyn is expected to appear more frequently on television, and a newly expanded team of advisers are working to formulate flagship policies that would underline his willingness to lead a revolt against vested interests.

With the party languishing 14 percentage points behind the Conservatives in the latest ICM poll, and after a disastrous performance in recent byelections, Jon Trickett, the party’s election coordinator, told the Guardian that Labour was honing its message and “ramping up” preparations for a possible early election.

“Theresa May has said there will not be a snap election; that doesn’t mean there won’t be an early election,” he said. “It’s our job to be ready. We’re ramping up the organisation now. There’s a great deal of analytical work going on behind the scenes.” He added that he had been working 15-hour days to put the party on standby.

Trickett said Labour was starting to frame the policies it would need to fight a future campaign. “We need to frame an argument about Britain, its past, present and future – but we will be doing that in a carefully modulated way.”

In the recent Richmond Park byelection, Labour candidate Christian Wolmar lost his deposit, receiving fewer votes than the local party has members. But Trickett rejected the frequent complaint of Labour MPs that the new recruits, who have swelled the party’s ranks since Corbyn won the leadership, are reluctant to play their part in campaigning. He said: “I’m confident that they’re ready to be mobilised, and ready to go.

“We are the largest party in Europe. Elections consist of an air war and a ground war. The kind of ground war we’re going to run would be something on a scale this country hasn’t seen before. That’s an important new feature in British politics, which we’re going to be using.”

With an early general election impossible to rule out as May prepares to trigger article 50, which starts the formal process for leaving the EU, Labour has yet to identify a list of target seats, or select candidates, to contest them. The Liberal Democrats, who have just nine MPs, have chosen 200 candidates, including former business secretary Vince Cable as well as new recruits, for seats they held before 2015.

Some senior Labour figures have been pressing Trickett to make a defensive list, identifying the seats Labour is likely to have to fight hardest to hold. Trickett said decisions about selection and resources would have to be made by the party’s governing body, the national executive committee (NEC). He said it had already released enough funds for him to be able to hire a “significant number” of new staff.

Helped by the revenue brought in by party members, who now number about 600,000, Corbyn has been bolstering his support team, including hiring David Prescott – son of the former deputy prime minister – to write speeches. Labour has also retained the polling firm BMG and the advertising agency Krow Communications to professionalise its approach to campaigning.

Some critical Labour MPs, alarmed at the party’s prospects, particularly in its traditional strongholds, are already thinking about how they would draw up election materials playing down their links to Corbyn. But his backers believe his populist credentials, seen in a series of raucous rallies throughout the summer as he fought off the challenge from backbencher Owen Smith, could be one of Labour’s strongest weapons.

Jeremy Corbyn takes part in a class showing how to make cheap healthy food during a visit to Centrepoint hostel in south London. Photograph: John Stillwell/PA

Corbyn’s supporters have been buoyed by his improved performance in recent prime minister’s questions, in which he has angrily challenged Theresa May about issues including social care and the NHS.

Emily Thornberry – the shadow foreign secretary and Corbyn’s constituency neighbour – was widely perceived to have done well in pressing the government on Brexit when she stood in for him at PMQs last week. She is now regarded as the favoured pro-Corbyn candidate to take over if the 67-year-old fails to restore the party’s fortunes and faces a renewed challenge to his leadership.

Corbyn’s new pollsters are telling him he faces a greater electoral threat from Ukip on the right than from centrist Labour voters lured to the Lib Dems by Tim Farron’s anti-Brexit stance.

The Brexit debate creates a tough electoral challenge for Labour by increasing the salience of issues such as immigration, which risk dividing the party’s liberal, metropolitan wing from many of its working-class voters. A study published on Thursday by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation suggested poorer voters’ concerns about immigration were a key driver of the referendum result – and the latest ICM poll showed Labour lagging behind the Conservatives among the working-class, DE socioeconomic group.

Privately, some members of Labour’s national executive committee are extremely worried about the party’s readiness for a general election campaign.

“The party is technically on election footing but we haven’t seen much in the way of tangible action,” one source close to the NEC said. “If this was December 2019, we would have selected all the candidates for winnable seats, we’d have asked MPs who was going to retire and done selections in their seats and probably be well on the way to selecting candidates in unwinnable ones too.”

Labour’s vote is being “eaten three ways”, the source said. “If there is an election, it is a Brexit election, nothing else. We’ll have the problem that we want to talk about the NHS and voters want to talk about Brexit. And we have no real coherent message about it.”

NEC member Alice Perry said the party was focused on the 2017 local elections. “We are throwing ourselves into getting fantastic Labour candidates elected at local government level and if there’s a general election at the same time, we’ll be ready,” she said.

Candidates who stood in 2015 are likely to be approached to stand again in the event of an emergency general election, because of the logistical challenge of organising selections with as little as six weeks’ notice.

Privately though, Labour sources said they thought many who lost in 2015 would be unwilling to stand again given the party’s current poll rating. “Even writing and printing a manifesto, you are talking about it taking eight weeks,” the source said. “If there was a spring election, that would have to be done by the end of January. These are problems other parties will face too but the Tories are probably preparing.”

The party appears increasingly divided over immigration, with the shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, urging against Labour becoming “Ukip-lite”, while her predecessor Andy Burnham, who is standing for Manchester mayor, warned in the Commons last week that failing to tackling immigration risks undermining the cohesion of our communities and the safety of our streets.