Leaked documents lay bare failings that led to Labour’s disastrous election defeat

The failings of Labour’s disastrous election strategy have been laid bare after leaked documents revealed Jeremy Corbyn’s senior aides channeled money and volunteers to unwinnable Tory-held constituencies rather defending vulnerable Labour seats.

The documents also suggest target seats were chosen in part on the basis of bitter internal Labour divisions, with the party failing to invest in close-run seats held by Corbyn sceptics.

On December 12 Labour’s ‘red wall’ crumbled, with a swathe of the Midlands, the north of England and north Wales returning Tory MPs, some for the first time in over 50 years.

But of the 86 seats identified as top targets by the Labour election team led by close Corbyn aide Karie Murphy, 60 were ‘offensive’ targets which the party looked to claim from the Tories. The only one won by Labour was Putney.

According to the document, revealed by the Sunday Times, Labour waged most of its offensive campaign in leave-voting Tory seats in the Midlands, the north of England and Wales — seats which saw the biggest swings against Labour.

In several cases Labour, whose leadership has said repeatedly since the election that their stance on Brexit cost them Leave voters, was pouring resources into Leave-backing seats which already had Tory majorities of 5,000 votes or more. 

These included Stourbridge (7,654 majority), Dover (6,437) and Gloucester (5,520). In every case, the Tories increased their majority to more than 10,000.

And despite a think tank identifying ‘Workington Man’ – a blue collar Leave-voting male voter from a small northern town – as being critical to the 2019 election result, the seat of Workington did not even appear on Labour’s target list.

It follows reports of Ms Murphy’s s extraordinary claim to Labour staff at the outset of the campaign that she would ignore polls and conventional strategy over the next six weeks.

‘We ripped up those rules,’ she told a room of advisers. ‘This is a full-on assault. Every single seat is there for the battle.’

Elsewhere seats put on – and left off – Labour’s hit list look decidedly personal. 

Tory candidate Mike Freer won his election to the Finchley and Golders Green constituency against Luciana Berger for the LibDems and Ross Semple of the Labour Party despite – or perhaps due to – Labour’s focus on the seat

Finchley and Golders Green made the list. The north London seat with a large Jewish population was a three-way marginal where Luciana Berger, the Jewish MP who defected from Labour and stood for the Liberal Democrats, was running. 

But amid a Labour onslaught the Tory incumbent sneaked through the middle and reclaimed the seat with a majority of 6,562, triple the previous total.

Yet Ruth Smeeth, the Jewish MP for Stoke-on-Trent North who had a slender majority, did not get the backing which came with being a target seat. 

The same applied to other Corbyn sceptics such as Mary Creagh and Melanie Onn 

Ms Smeeth told the Sunday Times: ‘This dossier just further confirms the incompetence at the highest levels of the Labour Party — not only have they failed to recognise the challenges that we face in terms of leadership, racism in the party and our Brexit policy, they also had no idea how to run the campaign.

‘Good colleagues lost by hundreds of votes because seemingly no one in head office was prepared to look at data — they should be ashamed of themselves.’

The revelation is bound to further enrage Labour MPs already furious leak that Ms Murphy and fellow Corbyn adviser Seamus Milne retain their jobs and salaries despite hundreds of Labour MPs and their staff losing their seats and their paycheques just two weeks before Christmas.