Few MPs expect leadership challenge soon but are organising across the UK to prevent changes lowering threshold for candidates

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Jeremy Corbyn’s centre-left critics are launching a systematic fightback aimed at preventing the Labour leader from ensuring a leftist successor if he steps down before 2020.

With renewed speculation about Corbyn’s future on Sunday, when Labour’s election coordinator Ian Lavery said there were “plenty of leaders to pick from”, some MPs were celebrating a series of local victories against candidates backed by the grassroots, pro-Corbyn Momentum group.

Few MPs expect an imminent leadership challenge, but by organising in constituencies across the country, they hope to prevent Labour’s annual conference from adopting what some call the “McDonnell clause”, a rule change that would lower the threshold for the number of nominations needed to get a future leadership contender on the ballot paper.

It emerged at the weekend that Labour has been road-testing the rising stars of the shadow cabinet, including the shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, and the shadow business secretary, Rebecca Long-Bailey, in focus groups with members of the public. Labour sources denied that the exercise had anything to do with “succession planning”.

Discussing the polling, which was leaked to the Sunday Times, on Pienaar’s Politics on BBC Radio 5 Live, Lavery said: “I think they are fantastic candidates. I think we have got lots of quality in the Labour party and it’s not just the two that’s been mentioned.”

Asked if that meant there were plenty of potential leaders to choose from, he said: “There’s plenty of leaders to pick from if and when Jeremy decides, of his own volition, that it’s not for him at the election. That isn’t the case at this point in time.”

Long-Bailey, widely thought to be the leadership’s current favoured candidate, and her ally, the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, could struggle to gather the 37 MPs’ signatures required to be on the ballot paper.

Corbyn only did so in 2015 because some MPs lent him their signatures to widen the field of candidates. Lowering the bar from 15% of MPs to 5% would make it easier for a pro-Corbyn candidate to be put to the membership, who voted convincingly for him last September.

Constituency parties have begun to choose their delegates for this year’s party conference.

Some of the MPs at the centre of the renewed fight for the party’s future are veterans of the battle against the Militant group in the 1980s. John Spellar, the MP for Warley, said: “It’s very important that the party remains in safe hands. It’s to keep the party electable.”

Richard Angell of centrist Labour pressure group Progress said: “Moderates are staying in the Labour party to fight for its future, and they’re prepared to turn up and do their bit to support candidates that ensure we have a Labour party that seeks to win over the public for a centre-left government.”

A Momentum source said: “Off the back of two general election defeats, Labour members overwhelmingly elected Jeremy Corbyn as leader to demand a break from the politics of austerity and Westminster elitism and reinvigorate Labour as a party with a real transformative, socialist agenda that can provide the solutions the British people want and need.

“Last summer’s coup plotters, who tried to make the party safe for vested economic interests, may be at it again, but they won’t win.”

Labour faces two crucial byelections later this month in Stoke-on-Trent and Copeland, Cumbria, which should give the clearest picture yet of the extent to which Brexit is shifting the electoral landscape.

Corbyn’s leadership had to navigate through one of its sternest tests to date earlier this month when he whipped the party to support the government’s legislation allowing Theresa May to trigger article 50, beginning the formal EU exit process.

More than 50 MPs rebelled last week at the bill’s third reading and four shadow ministers resigned earlier this month, triggering a reshuffle.

But Corbyn and his allies believe failing to back the bill would have enabled them to be portrayed as seeking to block Brexit, which might have proved toxic in pro-leave constituencies, many of which are represented by Labour MPs.

Two small grassroots victories brought cheer to Corbyn’s critics this weekend. The chairmanship of London Young Labour, the party’s youth movement in the capital, usually considered to be the heartland of Corbynism, was won by the centrist Miriam Mirwitch, who beat the Momentum member Beth Foster-Ogg by 189 votes to 87.

Christine Shawcroft, a close ally of the Momentum founder, Jon Lansman, failed in an attempt to win the chairmanship of the Tower Hamlets Labour party.

Momentum, which grew out of Corbyn’s leadership campaign, has been riven by infighting in recent months, with two rival factions, Grassroots Momentum and Open Momentum, fighting for control of its future.

A Labour source said of the leaked focus groups: “In common with all political parties, Labour conducts polling to get a clearer picture of views in different parts of the country.

“Polling of northern voters was about how best to get Labour’s message across in the north and has nothing at all to do with ‘succession planning’.”

The source added that similar exercises would be carried out in other parts of the country.

Speaking on Sunday, the deputy Labour leader, Tom Watson, told BBC1’s The Andrew Marr Show that Labour had “got the leadership settled for this parliament”.

• This article was amended on February 12 2017 to reflect that nominees for the Labour leadership require the support of 37 MPs