Miliband says Jeremy Corbyn would take Labour ‘backwards’

Labour leadership frontrunner Jeremy Corbyn would take the party "backwards" and risks leaving Britain a one-party state, David Miliband has warned.

In the latest of a string of interventions from the party’s big beasts, the former foreign secretary endorsed Liz Kendall to take the top job and disclosed his second preference would go to Yvette Cooper.

The "angry defiance" of the Corbyn campaign will lead only to electoral defeat, he warns in an article for the Guardian.

Mr Miliband wrote: “Given the collapse of the Lib Dems, the stakes now are very high indeed, not just for Labour but for the country. Get it wrong, and Britain could become a multiparty democracy with only one party – the Conservative Party – that can win parliamentary majorities. A one-governing-party state.”

Mr Miliband dismissed the radical left-winger’s “demand that Labour become an anti- austerity movement on the Greek model”.

Suspension bid

Meanwhile, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall have denied reports that Peter Mandelson approached them in a bid to suspend the election by persuading the pair and Mr Burnham to drop out en masse.

While Ms Cooper said she had not been approached directly by the grandee and said she was unaware if her campaign team had been contacted, Ms Kendall insisted that neither she nor her office had spoken to the peer.

Asked about the claims made by the Daily Telegraph, Ms Kendall told BBC Radio 4's World At One: "No, neither me nor anybody in my team [have spoken to Lord Mandelson]. I have no idea where that came from." – (PA)