Labour leadership: Demands for Jeremy Corbyn to apologise as he faces MPs after historic defeat

Jeremy Corbyn is facing demands to apologise for Labour’s election campaign and sack those responsible for its failure when he faces MPs for the first time since the defeat.

The Labour leader is expected to address a meeting of his parliamentary party in Westminster on Tuesday as MPs return for their first day back after last week’s landslide victory for Boris Johnson.

The meeting comes amid growing expectations that Corbyn ally Rebecca Long-Bailey is set to launch a bid for the leaderhship, with her flatmate and friend Angela Rayner running for the deputy's job in an effective joint ticket.

With potential contenders for the leadership testing the water before deciding whether to mount a bid, shadow business secretary Long-Bailey was emerging as the favoured candidate of senior figures around Mr Corbyn, while Lisa Nandy was attracting interest from those wanting a sharp change in direction in response to the loss of long-held seats in the midlands and the north.

Mr Corbyn is resisting calls to step down immediately from senior MPs, including former deputy leader Harriet Harman, amid concerns he is staying on to ensure his successor takes on his left-wing agenda.

There is anger among MPs that senior Corbyn aides like communications chief Seumas Milne, chief of staff Karie Murphy and political adviser Andrew Murray remain in place despite their role in running the doomed campaign.

It is understood that Mr Milne and Ms Murphy will be eligible for payoffs if they leave their jobs, because they were switched onto permanent contracts, instead of the time-limited contracts linked to the tenure of the leader that are the norm for staff reporting directly to him.

Anger is heightened by the fact that the party general secretary has warned staff employed on temporary contracts that they may lose their jobs by Christmas, as Labour is entitled to around £1.5m of state support in so-called Short money, which is linked to numbers of seats.

One senior MP told The Independent: “I think Jeremy should apologise and explain why he proposed an election we all knew he would lose. He also needs to tell us who is getting sacked for it.”

Jonathan Reynolds, the shadow economic secretary, said: “Clearly many things went wrong for us in this campaign, but the quality of the campaign itself was bad and I would expect the people who ran that campaign to be leaving. I don’t think it’s tenable for those people to stick around.”

A meeting of officers of the party’s ruling National Executive Committee later this week is expected to agree a leadership contest beginning on 7 January and lasting eight to 10 weeks, meaning Mr Corbyn’s replacement may not be in post until the start of April. But it was not clear whether the full NEC – including representatives of the parliamentary Labour Party, unions and constituency parties – will be asked to meet to approve the timetable.

There are concerns that Corbyn supporters may seek to impose a long campaign to give him more time in charge to direct the succession and a late cut-off point for new members to be entitled to vote for the leader, allowing the recruitment of more sympathisers.

“There’s a suspicion that people around the leader are playing for time and trying to string it out in the hope that they will be able to come up with something,” said one backbencher. “The concern is it should be an NEC decision and it won’t be, it will just be the officers.”

NEC member Margaret Beckett said she had not been told whether the full committee will meet, adding: “It’s natural for the NEC officers to meet first and make recommendations to the full NEC. If the NEC isn’t going to meet, that’s another matter. I think that would concern a lot of people.”

Mr Reynolds said it was vital that a new leader is in place by the end of March, to give him or her a chance to mount an effective campaign for local and mayoral elections on 7 May.

Meanwhile, potential leadership candidate Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, was embroiled in a bitter row with ousted MP Caroline Flint, consulting lawyers after her former colleague refused to withdraw claims she called Labour Leave voters “stupid”.

And a number of ex-MPs who lost seats in former Labour strongholds are in discussions with the parliamentary Labour Party about the possible launch of an informal inquiry into the reasons for the collapse in support in the midlands and north, separate from the leadership’s “process of reflection” announced by Mr Corbyn.

Former minister Pat McFadden said the new leader must represent a break from the Corbyn era.

“The greatest mistake the Labour Party could make now would be to trot out the excuses that we have heard over recent days, that it’s all Brexit’s fault or the media’s fault or – worst of all – that we won the argument,” Mr McFadden told Sky News.

“None of those things will wash.

“Unless we learn the fundamental depth of our defeat and have a big change of direction, all we will do is keep handing power to the Conservatives and that is not why the Labour Party exists. We exist to win power, not to come second in a two-horse race.”

He warned: “If the next leader is ‘continuity Corbyn’, that would be the greatest mistake the Labour Party could make. The strategy of rejecting every lesson we learnt in order to win in the 1990s and 2000s has been tested and tested to destruction.”