Tony Blair has called on Labour members to abandon the policies and political leanings of Jeremy Corbyn to ensure the survival of the party. In a provocative intervention, the three-time election-winning former prime minister said that if Corbyn’s wing of the party remains in charge, then Labour will be finished as a political force.

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Corbyn and his closest allies have called for a period of reflection after Thursday’s general election defeat, Labour’s worst result since 1935. A battle is now under way for control of the party, with Corbyn’s loyalists seemingly determined to retain dominance.

“The Labour party, by its self-indulgence – and that’s what it was in the end – was the effective handmaiden of Brexit. It’s not our fault, because the fault is with those who advocated it. But our combination of misguided ideology and utter incompetence allowed it to happen,” the former Labour leader told the BBC’s Newsnight on Wednesday.

“The far left that has taken over the Labour party … If they’re in charge of the Labour party going forward, then I think the Labour party is finished.”

Labour won 203 seats in the election, down 59, and saw its share of the vote fall by 7.8 percentage points to 32.2%, while the Conservatives won 365 seats, up 47, with 43.6% of the vote.

Although Corbyn’s supporters point out that they managed to attract more than 10m votes, the catastrophic defeat has prompted deep soul-searching in the party.

Earlier on Wednesday, Blair delivered a speech in central London in which he described the takeover of Labour by the left as a “glorified protest movement with cult trimmings, utterly incapable of being a credible government”.

He said few would bet against a decade of Conservative rule given the state of Labour, and that unless the party changed course, it faced the threat of never winning power again.

“The choice for Labour is to renew itself as the serious, progressive, non-Conservative competitor for power in British politics, or retreat from such an ambition, in which case over time it will be replaced,” Blair said.

He criticised Corbyn for leading Labour to defeat with a set of ideas that voters had no interest in. “He personified politically an idea, a brand, of quasi-revolutionary socialism, mixing far-left economic policy with deep hostility to western foreign policy,” he said.

“[This] never has appealed to traditional Labour voters, never will appeal to them, and represented for them a combination of misguided ideology and terminal ineptitude that they found insulting.”

Blair continued: “It’s essentially a cry of rage against the system. It’s not a programme for government. To win power we need self-discipline, not self-indulgence.”

Play Video 2:19 Jeremy Corbyn says he will stay as Labour leader until next year – video

Corbyn, besides a promise of another EU referendum in which he said he would be neutral, offered voters a radical socialist agenda with higher public spending, sweeping nationalisation and taxes on the wealthy.

His supporters have maintained that Blair betrayed the working classes by shifting the party to the right and undermined faith in politicians by supporting the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Blair said Corbyn’s complicated and equivocal stance on Brexit had displeased both opponents and advocates of the UK’s departure from the EU. “We pursued a path of almost comic indecision, alienated both sides of the debate, leaving our voters without guidance or leadership,” he said.

Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, has also made a public plea for the party to pick a leader from the “mainstream tradition” because it had become a London-centric “liberal left echo chamber”.

“What I mean by that is a leader in the mould of John Smith, Clement Attlee – people who understood that Labour had to both. Yes, be radical in the change we want to make, but also have a plan that can be acceptable to the majority of British people, and we seem to have forgotten that,” he said.

Referring to the party’s rejection of the radical politics of Michael Foot in the 80s, he said: “We had to learn that lesson in 1983 and I think we are going to learn it all over again in 2019.”

Corbyn’s office declined to comment.