John McDonnell has said he will not return to the shadow cabinet after Labour’s worst general election result in a generation.

The shadow chancellor, seen as one of the architects of Labour’s shift to the left, has been a major figure at the top of the party since Jeremy Corbyn’s surprise 2015 leadership victory. But he had been criticised for his influence on Labour’s decision to support a second Brexit referendum, which alienated many voters in the party’s once solid heartlands who had voted to leave the European Union.

McDonnell said on Saturday he had “done his bit” and it was time for the party to move on. “The new leadership coming in, I think, will enable us to move forward on the key issues – getting a Brexit deal that works for all of us, tackling these grotesque levels of inequality,” he told BBC News.

“But the big one … is climate change, and my fear is five years of a fossil fuel-backed government under Boris Johnson means we will miss this five-year opportunity of saving our planet.”

McDonnell denied that he had backed the wrong Labour leader, saying Corbyn could have won in 2017. But this time, he said: “Things moved on, Brexit dominated everything, and that was the horns of a dilemma we were on.

“The new leader will come in place, appoint the shadow cabinet,” McDonnell said. “I won’t be part of the shadow cabinet. I’ve done my bit. We need to move on at that stage, with that new leader, and I think we will be in a position [to be] learning lessons, listening to people and constructing a broad coalition right the way across the country.”

He said the current shadow cabinet would stay in place for the interim period, and would respond to the Queen’s speech on Thursday. “My fear is that we’re in for a long haul now, possibly five years,” he said.

McDonnell said there needed to be a debate about how “someone [Corbyn] – who I think is one of the most principled, honest, sincere, committed, anti-racist politicians – [was] demonised by a smear campaign”.

“I think we have a wider debate here about the role of social media and the media overall,” he said.

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Positioning in the race to become the next Labour leader has already started, with the ardent remainer David Lammy confirming he was considering putting his name forward.

Others being touted to take over include Lisa Nandy, who represents leave-voting Wigan, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Angela Rayner, Sir Keir Starmer, Jess Phillips and Emily Thornberry. McDonnell named the shadow business secretary, Long-Bailey, the shadow education secretary, Rayner, and the shadow justice secretary, Richard Burgon, as part of a “new generation” who could be expected to take leading positions.

John McDonnell said that the NEC officers – a sub-group of senior members of Labour’s ruling body – would meet next week and decide the timetable for a leadership election in the New Year. “It will be the usual time – a couple of months or something,” he said.

Members of the wider NEC – who said that they had been contacted by the party’s leadership only to be told not to speak to the media about the election results – argued on Twitter that they would expect the leadership election timetable to be decided by a meeting of all of the committee’s members. “Any decisions on the future of the party and the leadership must be made by the full NEC, not the small officer’s group,” wrote NEC member James Asser.



An NEC meeting is scheduled for the end of January, but members said they would expect to be called to an emergency meeting before then.

Several former Labour MPs who lost their seats in the election have blamed Corbyn for the party’s defeat. Helen Goodman, the former Labour MP for Bishop Auckland, said Corbyn had “failed as a communicator”.

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She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The biggest factor was obviously the unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn as leader. The fact of the matter is that Jeremy Corbyn failed as a communicator, whatever his good personal qualities – and he undoubtedly has good personal qualities – he failed as a communicator.”

Anna Turley, who lost her seat in Redcar in the north-east, described Corbyn’s leadership as a barrier. She said: “For me, when you’re getting four doors in a row of lifelong Labour voters saying, ‘I’m sorry, Anna, I’m a lifelong Labour voter, I like what you’ve done, but I just can’t vote for that man to be prime minister,’ I’m afraid that’s a fundamental barrier that we just couldn’t get across.”

She said Corbyn was “absolutely” more of a reason than Brexit for her constituents choosing to vote for another party, adding: “In my constituency, even though it was a 67% leave constituency, it was four to one the leadership over Brexit.”

She said former Labour voters “didn’t trust him to put our country first” because of “his history and his baggage around security and terrorism”.

But the Labour MP for York Central, Rachael Maskell, who retained her seat and is a longtime Corbyn supporter, said it was not just the leader who should take responsibility for defeat.

“We’ve all got to take responsibility, but I don’t think apportioning blame to a complex situation in a simplistic way is really the way to approach this. We’ve got to understand what is really happening across our political system,” she said.