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Sir Patrick Stewart says he probably won’t vote Labour again because of the direction Jeremy Corbyn has taken the party.

The Star Trek legend has been a Labour supporter since 1945 when he was 5 years old.

But now he says he finds it “difficult to understand what Labour really stands for or what it represents right now. It doesn’t feel like my party any more.”

He told the New European he could not vote for the party so long as it supports Brexit .

And he questioned Corbyn’s motives for backing our exit from the EU.

(Image: PA)

He said: “I am not a politician and I am not a strategist, but I have a suspicion Jeremy believes a disastrous Brexit would benefit him politically, and, in all the chaos and confusion that would occur after the policy is implemented – in either a hard or a soft way, I might add – he sees himself taking power. It seems to me to be just plain wrong to play with the country’s future in this way.

“What Jeremy doesn’t appear to understand is that it would be the easiest thing in the world to attack the government on Brexit and to oppose it at every turn and to tear apart their arguments and expose it for what it is.

“There is, after all, nothing that is more opposed to basic Labour values than Brexit and I think just about everyone except him can now see that.”

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Sir Patrick has previously spoken positively about Corbyn.

Last year, he told the Reader’s Digest: “I think that Jeremy has begun to find a voice that’s clearly authentic and passionate.

“I’m beginning to have a feeling that there’s a route for Labour that might be very exciting for the country. I carried a placard for the first election after the war in 1945, when Clement Attlee got in, and those principles remain my principles.”

But he said when he finally met the Labour leader a few weeks ago, it was an awkward encounter.

“He was talking to a group of my friends after a theatre performance and I wandered up to join them,” he told the New European.

“Jeremy’s eye caught mine and he said ‘oh you’re looking very well’, and I made some light-hearted riposte along the lines of ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’.

“For some inexplicable reason, this annoyed him, and he shot back ‘you know, Patrick, you could just have said ‘thank you’ instead of making a joke out of it.” I couldn’t understand how he could take offence at such an utterly innocuous remark, and no one else could, and it made for rather an awkward silence.

“I just thought ‘oh well, I tried’, and, after a suitable interval, I discreetly headed off home.”