Emily Thornberry accused Chuka Umunna and other Labour Brexit rebels of “virtue signalling”, and fighting “faux battles” after three of the party’s frontbenchers were sacked for voting for his amendment.

The shadow foreign secretary said the rebels’ approach had unnecessarily exposed Labour divisions at a time when the party should be presenting itself as an alternative to Theresa May’s minority government.



“I don’t really understand it: I think there’s a little bit of virtue-signalling,” she said. “Chuka and me really don’t have a great deal of difference between us, and I think what’s unfortunate about what happened yesterday was that at a time when we could be exposing the differences in the Tory party, it was felt appropriate to have a vote on the single market”.

A fifth of Labour MPs backed an amendment tabled by MPs including Umunna and Stephen Doughty on Thursday night, urging the government to negotiate to keep Britain in the single market and the customs union. She added: “The last thing we want is for there to be faux battles that are not necessary, really. It’s silly when it might boil down to so little.”

Corbyn had asked his party to abstain from the vote on the single market amendment, and later sacked three junior ministers – Catherine West, Ruth Cadbury and Andy Slaughter – who voted in favour.

The shadow Brexit secretary, Keir Starmer, tried to reassure Labour rebels by promising to push for a Commons vote to prevent the prime minister from walking away from the EU without a deal.

In an interview with the Mirror, Starmer said Labour would work with other parties to demand a transition arrangement that would keep Britain in the EU for at least two more years.

He said May and the Brexit secretary, David Davis, needed to accept the general election result meant their plans for an “extreme Brexit” with no transition agreement was now “off the table.”

Thornberry, who played a prominent role during the election campaign, said rather than feuding over the details of Brexit policy, Labour MPs must be ready to get back into battle with the Tories.

“The campaign was great; it was fantastic being part of such a positive campaign. The thing is, we can’t be satisfied with it, because what we want to be is in government,” she said.

“You have to start thinking about what’s next: you have to start moving forward, and we’ve got to be ready to be the next government. I think we will be; I think it’s a question of how long it takes.”

Despite Corbyn’s packed rallies up and down the country, and the spectacle of the Glastonbury crowd singing “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn”, Thornberry, regarded by some as a potential future leader, insists the party’s policy platform was the most important factor.

“The star of the show was the manifesto. People think it was Jeremy, and I love Jeremy, but the star of the show was the manifesto. The star of the show was, ‘there is another way, it doesn’t have to be this way, there is an alternative to this. Austerity doesn’t work’,” she said. “The point is, politically, what has happened is that politics has moved: the centre ground has moved.”

She said she had defied the advice of Labour strategists and visited the supposedly safe Conservative seat of Canterbury during the campaign – a constituency she stood in unsuccessfully in 2001. “The party machine said you can’t go there, it’s not a priority. People got cross,” she said. “But I went there, and I said, ‘when all progressive people vote the same way, you will get a Labour MP’.”

The result in Canterbury, where Labour’s Rosie Duffield won a surprise victory, became a potent symbol on election night of Labour’s ability to make advances into traditional Tory territory.

Thornberry will be in Watford on Saturday, while Corbyn goes to Hastings, which home secretary Amber Rudd held with a flimsy majority of 346, as part of a national campaigning day, accusing May of having “no mandate”.

“I personally think there’s lots of seats where they’re now marginal, so we need to keep pushing that,” Thornberry said. “There should be no no-go areas: I go to too many seats where people say, ‘I’m a Labour supporter but I vote Lib Dem because they’ve got a better chance. Well, it’s about time we stopped all that: we are the party of government.”

However, Labour made its strongest gains at the general election in middle-class seats, while the Conservative vote held up better than elsewhere in poorer, post-industrial areas – and Thornberry suggested Vernon Coaker, who represents the Nottinghamshire constituency of Gedling, or Natascha Engel, who lost her North East Derbyshire seat to the Conservatives, should be commissioned to lead research about how Labour can respond.

“I think that we have to be working on that now, and making sure that we do some profound thinking about that, and not leave people behind, because we are a coalition.”

She suggested Labour should continue to “flesh out” its policies – including by thinking about the lessons that should be learned from the botched response to the Grenfell Tower fire.

“For me, the challenge of that was, what does good government look like? It doesn’t look like this. I have a picture that used to belong to my mother – the Allegory of Good and Bad Government, from Siena. You can change people’s lives by having good government. They understood that in the 14th century in Italy. We are in the 21st century in Britain.”

“We are not a developing country, we’re a developed country – and a tower can burn down, all those people lose their lives, and as if that were not bad enough, the aftermath ... the idea that you come out in your knickers, you have nothing, and all you can do is hope there is a church nearby and someone will have donated a mattress to sleep on. What happened to the welfare state? What happened to the idea that we were all safe, because we looked after each in Britain, we looked out for each other?”

Despite the irritation of Thornberry and other front-benchers about their tactics, Labour’s Brexit rebels are determined to continue forcing the issue – and are prepared to work with MPs from other parties to do so.

Doughty said: “The key issue going forward is the extent to which Conservative MPs who have significant disquiet about the direction of Theresa May’s hard Brexit are willing to put their money where their mouth is and stand up for membership of the single market and the customs union, and other issues, in legislation that comes forward in the coming months.”

Labour’s position on Brexit, as spelled out in the party’s manifesto, is that leaving the EU will mean leaving the single market – but the negotiations should try to secure as many of its benefits as possible, including tariff-free trade.

Thornberry warned that voters who believed the party wanted to remain inside the single market were likely to conclude that Labour did not accept the referendum result. “What people will hear is that we don’t want to leave the EU and we’re not going to do as we’re told – this is the problem,” she said.

“Do we want to be in the single market or don’t we want to be in the single market has become a sort of shibboleth; but it isn’t really what it’s about,” she said, adding that remaining in the single market would also prevent the party from tackling voters’ concerns about migration.

“We cannot pretend that immigration was not a problem during the referendum, and we do need to be able to look at it, and we do need to be open to improving our immigration system.”