Jeremy Corbyn has made a mistake in appointing the Guardian journalist Seumas Milne to serve as the Labour party’s executive director of strategy and communications, Lord Mandelson has said.
The former business secretary, who held a similar post for Labour in the 1980s, said that the Guardian writer and former comment page editor was “completely unsuited” to the role because his political views were outside Britain’s political mainstream.
In an interview with The Week in Westminster on BBC Radio 4, Mandelson said that he knew and liked Milne, but the appointment showed that Corbyn was failing to show professionalism as Labour leader.
The former business secretary said: “I don’t think he’s growing into the job at all ... I don’t think he is showing any professionalism in his leadership of the Labour party and you see from his appointment of his strategy and communications director Seumas Milne, whom I happen to know and like as it happens. But he’s completely unsuited to such a job. He has little connection with mainstream politics or mainstream media in the country and yet he’s in charge of communications for the Labour party. That doesn’t sound very professional to me.”
Mandelson’s comments came as Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, suggested that he had been advising the Labour leadership when he said he had been “in conversation with the Corbynistas”. But he appeared to challenge the approach adopted by the shadow chancellor John McDonnell when he called on Labour to move away from anti-austerity politics.
“My advice is to shift away from the narrative of austerity – pro-austerity, anti-austerity – it is not an issue,” Varoufakis told the the Daily Politics on BBC2. “[George Osborne] tried a little bit of austerity – we Greeks are the champions of austerity. You tried it out here with a very small amount. It didn’t work and Osborne stopped it.”
Labour sources said that McDonnell spoke to Varoufakis and appeared on a platform with him at the TUC but he was not a formal adviser to the party.
