Andy Burnham backed by Dan Jarvis in Labour leadership race

By The Guardian

Dan Jarvis, the Labour MP who disappointed many party activists by refusing to stand for the party leadership, has given a personal boost to Andy Burnham’s campaign by endorsing the shadow health secretary.

The endorsement from one of the key figures in the 2010 intake follows the decision of the shadow work and pensions secretary, Rachel Reeves, to support the Burnham campaign. Securing the backing of Reeves and Jarvis is a coup for Burnham and his campaign manager Michael Dugher.

A buzz had grown about Jarvis’s own leadership qualities but the former paratrooper, the MP for Barnsley Central, decided at the outset of the contest to succeed Ed Miliband that his family commitments meant he could not stand for leader at present.

 

It is thought that Burnham has more than 70 nominations in the parliamentary Labour party and the breadth of his support is beginning to make it difficult for some of the other candidates such as Tristam Hunt, the shadow education secretary, and even Liz Kendall, the shadow health minister, to gather the 35 nominations from MPs they need to get on the ballot paper.

The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, due to make a speech on Tuesday promising to restore party links with business if elected leader, is thought to have secured as many as 50 nominations. Many other MPs have said they will not nominate at this stage and would wait to see the candidates perform at the June hustings.

 

Two leading figures from the Blair government, Lord Hutton, the former defence secretary, and Lady Morgan, a former Downing Street adviser, said it would be wrong if the threshold of 35 nominations from MPs meant only Cooper and Burnham made the ballot paper.

 

Morgan, an adviser to Tony Blair for 10 years, said: “We have just suffered a catastrophic election defeat and need the widest possible debate about how we rebuild support for the party. To try to close down that debate prematurely is both arrogant and plain wrong.”

 

Hutton, a former Labour business secretary, said: “Labour is facing a very deep crisis and can no longer exist to appeal to a diminishing trade union vote. We need a big debate we have been of deprived for the past five years and that requires more than two candidates. I have already said we need to skip a generation and MPs have a duty to provide a debate the party so badly needs.”

 

Kendall became the first Labour leadership candidate to challenge the Unite general secretary Len McCluskey, telling him to stop threatening Labour. But she also promised she would repeal any laws passed in this parliament designed to weaken employee rights.