Jeremy Corbyn’s team is making preparations for an alternative Queen’s speech to challenge Theresa May’s right to govern, as the Labour leader emerged from the election strengthened by wins across the country.



The Labour leadership said it wanted to lay the foundations for a different kind of government, after Corbyn defied expectations to make net gains of 29 seats overall at the expense of Conservatives, the Scottish National party and Liberal Democrats.

Labour’s remarkable turnaround since the local elections showed Corbyn leading the party to the biggest increase in vote share since Clement Attlee’s 1945 victory, with about 40% of the total.



There will now be jostling for places in the shadow cabinet of an emboldened Corbyn, with former big hitters such as Ed Miliband and Lisa Nandy possible candidates for comebacks. “I suspect most people would serve now and if he’s serious about being prime minister he could put that team of all the talents together,” one MP said. But an aide suggested that the leader would remember those who had stayed loyal to him.

Some Labour MPs had been privately speculating about whether to rally round figures such as Yvette Cooper, Dan Jarvis and Chuka Umunna if the result had been bad for the party but they have had their immediate ambitions frustrated. Those considered disloyal during the campaign, such as Nia Griffiths, the shadow defence secretary, who challenged the position on Trident, could also find themselves out of a job.

Labour MPs agreed that the election had effectively cemented Corbyn’s position as leader of the party less than a year after he lost a no-confidence vote with 172 colleagues voting against him.



While the party’s 261 seats left it short of the number needed to form a rainbow alliance with the Greens, SNP, Liberal Democrats, and Plaid Cymru, Corbyn said that he would present an alternative programme of government to May’s Queen’s speech, saying: “We will put forward our point of view, and we are of course ready to serve.”

In the hours after the result, some senior party figures publicly admitted they had been wrong to presume Corbyn could not appeal in marginals across England, after Labour took seats off the Tories in areas such as Bedford, Portsmouth, Peterborough and even Canterbury, which has been blue for more than a century.

Owen Smith, who lost a leadership challenge against Corbyn, said: “I was clearly wrong in feeling that Jeremy was unable to do this well and I think he’s proved me wrong and lots of people wrong and I take my hat off to him.”

When asked whether it was Corbyn’s or Labour’s policies that won the election, he said: “It has to be both. I don’t know what Jeremy’s got but if we could bottle it and drink it we’d all be doing very well.

“We were hearing people who hadn’t voted for a long while voting Labour yesterday evening, who were inspired by the policies – and, it has to be said, by Jeremy – to vote Labour last night.”

In a sign that Corbyn’s opponents were adjusting their view of his leadership, Wes Streeting, who has been one of his strongest critics in parliament, said Corbyn had shone in the campaign. “People saw Jeremy Corbyn at his very best,” he said.



“In spite of an advance in the number of seats Labour hold, we are still the second party and the vision in our manifesto won’t be realised for as long as we have a Conservative government. The Labour family has to come together now, look at what works and what didn’t and build an alternative that could win a general election,” he said, after building on his ultra-marginal majority to hold on in Ilford North.



Several MPs said they believed it was May’s manifesto mistakes that allowed them to capitalise so effectively. Those errors, such as the cut to free school meals, support for the reinstatement of fox hunting and the dementia tax, immediately gave Labour MPs readymade attack lines.

“It looked like we were the ones who called the election,” Toby Perkins, MP for Chesterfield, said. He cited fox hunting as a particular error. “People started thinking, if she gets a landslide what won’t she do? Their entire campaign strap-line could have been ‘I dare you not to vote for me’.



“Older voters realised the Tories were going to come after their house. It was such a non-Tory thing to do and we had something to say to everyone, especially older voters who were braced to vote Tory for their first time in their lives. The dementia tax brought them all straight back to us.”

Neil Coyle, who trebled his majority in Bermondsey and Old Southwark, said he believed Labour had been able to retain Corbyn-sceptic voters as well as enthusiasts. “People felt it was OK to vote Labour because they didn’t think he was going to be prime minister. I do think they thought it was a free hit to the Tories but that May would win.”



Other MPs emphasised that the party had gone backwards in some areas, such as the coal belt of the east Midlands, including Mansfield and North East Derbyshire. “It’s remarkable to have an election where Labour loses Mansfield but gains Canterbury,’ the MP said.



New Labour MP for Canterbury, Rosie Duffield is congratulated on her victory. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer

Many seats where the party lost ground were in this part of the country, with one party source describing them as places where Corbyn’s attitude to the Queen and the armed forces would have mattered.

Another in a marginal seat in the north of England said Labour still had “a bloody big headache ahead” and warned against “too much triumphalism by London remainers and Corbynistas” when there was still no majority for the party despite May’s dire campaign.

MPs in seats in the north and Midlands also cautioned some exuberant colleagues who have been briefing that May’s failure to get a majority meant staying in the single market would be back on the table. Many said they had promised voters in their Brexit-leaning seats that they would see through Brexit and would not back the continuation of free movement.



The party will also be examining whether it was too cautious in its approach to seats, prioritising defending seats which ended up with massive majorities, such as Tooting or Hampstead and Kilburn, rather than pushing to win some that they had assumed were out of reach, such as Amber Rudd’s Hastings and Rye seat or Anna Soubry’s seat of Broxtowe.



The party came within 300 votes of taking Soubry’s seat, but one source close to the campaign said the party had put in zero resources. “If we’d known what was happening, we could have won another 15 seats,” one source said. “If there is another election we know what to do.”

