Jeremy Corbyn to stay on as Labour leader ‘until early next year’ after election defeat

Jeremy Corbyn has defended his leadership legacy after Labour suffered its worst General Election result since 1935.

He said he was ‘very sad’ about his party losing 59 constituencies, many of which were traditional Labour safe seats which switched to the Tories for the first time.

The Labour leader defended his manifesto as having ‘huge public support’ but said the election was ‘ultimately taken over by Brexit’.

He refused to accept his leadership contributed to today’s result and said he has ‘done everything he could’ to steer his party.

When asked in an interview about his plans to step down, he said: ‘The national executive will have to meet, of course, in the very near future and it is up to them. It will be in the early part of next year.’

He added: ‘I will stay here until someone is elected to succeed me and I will step down at that point.’

In an attempt to dissect what went wrong when voters went to the polls yesterday, Corbyn said his whole strategy was ‘to reach out beyond the Brexit divide to try and bring people together because ultimately the country has to come together.’

He said his party haemorrhaged a lot of seats because many leave voters in Labour constituencies opted for Eurosceptic or Conservative candidates.

Corbyn added: ‘We didn’t make the gains that I hope we could have done, particularly in the midlands and Yorkshire and the north.’

Defending his record, he said membership has more than doubled under his watch and that Labour has developed a ‘radical but serious and fully costed manifesto’.

Corbyn says he has received ‘more personal abuse than any other leader has received by a great deal of the media’, who he said have ‘absolutely’ misrepresented him.

He said ‘more than 80%’ of coverage about him and his party was ‘negative, hostile, or frankly just downright abuse of individuals and character assassination’.

Corbyn added: ‘I just think we need to have some consideration on the effect this has on politics when the whole of political debate is seen through the prism of personal abuse and personal attacks.’

When pressed on anti-Semitism within his party, he said he had ‘inherited a system that didn’t work’ and had introduced rule changes to deal with the problem.

He added: ‘I think anti-Semitism’s an absolutely evil curse in our society and I would always condemn it, I always do and always will.’

Rejecting the assertion that his left-wing pitch cost him the election, he said: ‘Is ending Universal Credit, paying the WASPI women and having a green industrial revolution too left wing?

‘They are huge issues that face our country and I think our manifesto did face up to all of them.’

When asked if he thought ‘Corbynism was dead’ he said there is no such thing.

He added: ‘There is socialism, there is social justice, and the effort that hundreds of thousands of people did who saw in what we were saying, particularly young people, some hope for themselves.

‘Some future, where they wouldn’t go into debt just because they wanted an education.’

Corbyn claimed the election result would not have been different if a more centrist, David Miliband-esque candidate led the charge because of the need to ‘bridge the divide’ between those who voted both leave and remain.

He added: ‘I did everything I could, of course I take responsibility for putting the manifesto forward but I have to say the manifesto was universally supported throughout our party and throughout our movement.’