Labour leader says party was distracted by contest and that some MPs will never accept his leadership

Jeremy Corbyn has attributed Labour’s low rating in opinion polls to the distraction of the leadership contest and said some Labour MPs will never be satisfied.

The Labour leader said he would continue to be optimistic and offer hope while seeing how the polls developed as the party set out its economic plans.

Labour has sunk to its lowest level in the polls since Gordon Brown was in charge after the financial crisis in 2009, with ratings ranging from 25% to around 28%.

The figures suggest dozens of Labour MPs could lose their seats and there would be a decisive Conservative majority if Theresa May decided to call a snap general election to get a mandate for her Brexit strategy.

After Labour was relegated into fourth place in the Sleaford byelection and lost its deposit in Richmond, some senior figures in the party have said Corbyn has a year to appeal to a wider base.

But in an interview with the New Statesman, the leader appeared relaxed about Labour’s prospects, and highlighted his success in increasing membership.

Asked about the polling, Corbyn said: “We were distracted by the leadership contest when we could have been attacking the Tories. We’ll see how they [the polls] develop as we develop our economic programme. We have got to be optimistic. We have got to offer hope, not blame.”

Pressed on why some voters apparently were not listening, he said: “It’s extremely noisy, there is a lot of hate out there. But people also think about things more deeply than many give them credit for. And a lot of media tend to speak to a lot of other media and don’t recognise that there’s a whole parallel system of information going on through social media that never touches the rest of it.

“So there are different forms of communication going on, and the dangers of racist populism are very serious indeed. And you have to confront it.”

He said some Labour MPs would never accept his leadership. “Some people are just never satisfied,” he said. “Look, I hope they all have a wonderful Christmas, and I hope that we can do what we did on the schools, on the health service, on the economy, and win the election campaigns to come. We are on the way. We are hopeful. We are confident. And we are committed.”

It came as Labour MPs reacted angrily to the news that Corbyn had hired a former Sinn Féin worker to join his office. The Labour leader told a committee of MPs that Jayne Fisher – who he described as “very lovely” – would join the party as head of stakeholder engagement.

One backbench MP told the Guardian that it was a “disastrous decision”.

“It will result in a whole load of headlines about Jeremy Corbyn’s longstanding support for the IRA,” he said.

The leader attracted controversy in 1984 when he invited Gerry Adams and other members of Sinn Féin to the Commons shortly after the IRA Brighton bomb nearly killed Margaret Thatcher and other members of her cabinet. However, he insisted that he was working towards achieving peace.

The MP added: “The Labour party members voted for Jeremy but they did not vote for him to employ Sinn Féin or supporters of the SWP.”

A spokeswoman for the Labour party said: “We don’t comment on staffing matters.”

However, sources said that Fisher had been in the Labour party since she was 18 and was part of the party’s women’s conference in the 1980s and 1990s.

They said she took part in an initiative to support the Good Friday agreement with cross-party support, which led to her working for the Sinn Féin parliamentary group. They said that was part of ensuring a presence in Westminster during the peace process and was about political outreach.



