Leader says he thinks US senator, whose team is helping Labour, will publicly back party during UK visit before polling day

Jeremy Corbyn has said he is hoping for a last-minute endorsement from the US political maverick Bernie Sanders, whose campaign set the country’s presidential election alight in spite of the odds against him.

The unsuccessful challenger for the Democratic nomination in the US is due in the UK a few days before the general election on 8 June, and Momentum activists are hoping to obtain a Corbyn endorsement from him at an event in Bristol on 3 June.

In an interview with the Guardian, Corbyn said he had “a lot of time for Bernie”. Asked if Sanders would endorse him when he visited Britain, the Labour leader said: “I can’t say. I hope he will. I think he probably will, actually. But we mustn’t predict these things.”



The party leader added that members of the Sanders campaign team were already helping Labour, with others expected to arrive over the next few weeks. “We are in touch with Bernie’s team,” Corbyn said. “They are over here helping us. We also, during the leadership campaign, looked at a lot of their campaigning methods and again some people came over and and gave us advice.”

Sanders, the senator for Vermont, was widely judged to be a no-hoper when he began his White House bid, standing as a socialist in the Democratic race. But he built a grassroots movement and pioneered campaign techniques that saw him attract 13m votes and gave Hillary Clinton a tough race for the Democratic nomination.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sanders addresses a rally in Carson, California last year. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

Sanders has several speaking engagements in the UK in early June, including in Oxford and in Brixton, south London. He is also delivering a speech at the Festival of Ideas in Bristol, and speaking as the author of Our Revolution: A Future To Believe In, at the Hay book festival.

A spokesman for Sanders said he “hadn’t weighed in” with any endorsement decision on the general election yet. US politicians traditionally do not intervene in other countries’ elections but Donald Trump backed Brexit last year and Barack Obama made a last-minute intervention in the French presidential election in support of Emmanuel Macron.

While members of the Sanders campaign are offering practical support, an endorsement by the man himself could provide a boost for Labour members who admired the way he fought his campaign. The sharing of techniques has been a two-way process, with the Sanders campaign picking up some ideas from Corbyn’s first leadership contest in 2015.

Corbyn was effusive about the senator. “I think Bernie Sanders ran an incredible campaign and it had a massive effect. Who would have thought that in 2017 somebody self-describing themselves as a socialist would get within a whisker of winning the Democratic nomination and, had he been the candidate, who knows, who knows. We will never know the answer to that question. But what a formidable guy. I have a lot of time for him.”

Endorsing Corbyn could create some family complications for Sanders, however. His brother Larry, who moved to the UK in the late 1960s, is fighting the Oxford East constituency for the Green party. However, there would be nothing to stop him endorsing both men.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Larry Sanders. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

Sanders’ volunteers are also helping Momentum, the grassroots organisation that grew out of Corbyn’s two leadership contests. One of the first of them to arrive, Erika Uyterhoeven, flew in from Boston on Friday and spent the day helping with training, before heading out on Saturday to canvass in a north London marginal seat.

As one of the national organising directors for Sanders, Uyterhoeven, 30, was responsible for bringing in volunteers to help in the battleground states for the Democratic nomination. “When I started on the Bernie campaign, we were more than 20 points down nationally and we walked away with the largest margin of victory for the first primary in the nation [New Hampshire],” she said.

Momentum has 23,000 paid-up members and more than 100,000 online supporters, according to the organisation. Uyterhoeven said throwing its volunteers into the 100 constituencies that would decide the election could make a difference.

The organisation will use an app that enables campaigners to make calls from home rather than attend phone-banks. Uyterhoeven, however, said text messages were a more effective campaigning tool than phone calls or emails because surveys showed a higher proportion of texts were read.

Tad Devine, the chief strategist for Sanders’s presidential bid, said he was not involved in the Labour campaign, adding he was sceptical about drawing comparisons between Sanders and Corbyn.

“The obvious parallels are in political orientation but I see them as different figures. Bernie Sanders had a great ability to connect with people at a basic level. People connected with him. Jeremy Corbyn does not strike me as someone who makes that kind of connection. I think Hillary Clinton did not make that kind of connection,” Devine said.

Another Sanders volunteer, Simon Bracey-Lane, is working with a new group in Britain – Campaign Together, which encourages tactical voting – but he said he hoped a Labour leader might emerge to match the current popularity of Sanders.

“In this election, we need to do whatever we can to stop a Tory super-majority,” he said. “In future, we need to preserve the progressive movement but not necessarily a progressive alliance.”

Bracey-Lane, who worked as a local field organiser during the Iowa caucus and other state campaigns last year, said: “The big lesson of the 2016 campaign is that whether or not you win, you have to build a long-term activist base and you need a full-throated campaign that doesn’t pull its punches.”