Tony Blair has urged Labour supporters to disregard their antipathy towards him and not to elect Jeremy Corbyn as MP.
Mr Corbyn, a left-winger who emphatically rejects Mr Blair’s New Labour legacy, is on course to win his party’s leadership contest, according to polls and other indicators.
But Mr Blair warned that the party would face “annihilation” under members’ favourite candidate.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re on the left, right or centre of the party, whether you used to support me or hate me,” Mr Blair wrote in the Guardian newspaper.
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“The party is walking eyes shut, arms outstretched over the cliff’s edge to the jagged rocks below.”
The former prime minister’s intervention is an apparent about-face on comments he made last month, where he told an audience in London that he would not endorse a leadership candidate for fear his unpopularity might end up hurting their chances.
By contrast, he has made efforts to make his negative opinion about Mr Corbyn known. He has previously told people who felt they supported the left-winger in their heart to “get a heart transplant”.
Former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning that Mr Blair had clearly not read Mr Corbyn’s manifesto.
"Tony Blair clearly hasn’t read Jeremy Corbyn’s manifesto because he’s not going back to the 1980s; he’s dealing with the problems we have got now," he said.
"There’s a few people who are a bit embittered and can’t come to terms with the fact the last Labour government wasn’t the greatest in human history. But the vast bulk of Labour MPs will know their local party want them to make this work."
Mr Corbyn warned earlier in the campaign that Mr Blair could stand trial for war crimes over the invasion of Iraq, which is thought by some to have been illegal under international law.
“I think it was an illegal war,” he said in an interview with BBC2's Newsnight adding that former UN secretary general had confirmed that. “Therefore he (Blair) has to explain that,” Corbyn said.
