Keir Starmer’s deputy has told him he needs to learn from Andy Burnham and bring the Greater Manchester Mayor into his inner circle as he tries to save his premiership.
With speculation mounting over a coup by Labour MPs in the wake of a humiliating third-place finish in the Gorton and Denton by-election, the comments by Lucy Powell, Labour’s deputy leader, add to the pressure on the prime minister.
Ms Powell helped lead the unsuccessful by-election campaign in Greater Manchester but was the only member of the National Executive Committee who voted to allow Mr Burnham to be the candidate.
Sir Keir personally blocked Mr Burnham from standing and many Labour MPs have since claimed that the Greater Manchester Mayor would have been able to prevent the Green victory and win in what was Labour’s seventh-safest seat.
Asked on the BBC’s Newscast if the prime minister needs to be more like Mr Burnham, who is popular in the polls, Ms Powell said: “Well, look, let's learn from Andy and also bring Andy more on board with what we're doing as well.”
Asked if Mr Burnham would have held the seat for Labour, she said: "Well, he probably would have done because I think certainly the Greens wouldn't have gone after the seat in the same way that they did."
Ms Powell said she accepted collective responsibility over blocking Mr Burnham from standing, but pointed out: "I was the one person who voted for him to be allowed to stand in this by-election".
Sir Keir claimed at the time that he had blocked Mr Burnham because it would have meant that there would have been an election for Greater Manchester mayor, which the party feared it would lose.
However, others believed that Mr Burnham would have ended up replacing Sir Keir as Labour leader and prime minister if he had made his way into parliament.
The party instead picked local councillor Angeliki Stogia to run. She came third behind the winner, Hannah Spencer for the Green Party and Reform UK’s Matthew Goodwin.
The row comes as MPs on the left of the party are also ratcheting up pressure around another scandal that has rocked Sir Keir’s leadership by sending subject access requests to the Labour Together think tank and the PR company APCO, which they hired to look into journalists who were criticising them.
The think tank, which was run by Sir Keir’s former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, was the centre of attempts to reclaim the Labour Party from the left-wing leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and later install Sir Keir as leader.
But it has been accused of attempting to smear journalists who were investigating its donations. Now Labour MPs Richard Burgon and John McDonnell have confirmed to The Independent that they have requested all documents relating to them from both the think tank and APCO.
Josh Simons dramatically resigned as a Cabinet Office minister on Saturday over “becoming a distraction” for his previous role in Labour Together recruiting APCO. Mr Simons and Labour Together have said that APCO was only recruited to look into a leak, not to carry out a smear campaign.
Mr Burnham himself is yet to comment on the result in Gorton and Denton, while Sir Keir has vowed to fight on despite the “disappointing” outcome.
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