Labour MPs have been asked to phone around undecided local party members with personal appeals to back Owen Smith’s campaign in a last-ditch attempt to overturn Jeremy Corbyn’s lead.
Corbyn is the overwhelming favourite to retain the Labour leadership, and a YouGov poll gives him a 24-point lead, but Smith’s campaign is convinced the race is closer. The result is due to be announced the day before the Labour conference at the end of the month.
In an email to supportive Labour MPs seen by the Guardian, Smith’s campaign asks them to attend a phone-bank session in Westminster to make calls to members who are yet to make up their minds. An aide to Smith stresses the importance of Labour MPs contacting undecided voters personally.
The campaign believes around 14% of Labour members are still undecided, while 46% are backing Corbyn and 40% are behind Smith, and around a third of members have yet to cast their ballot.
Smith told Sky News on Thursday: “There’s been one poll that puts me 20 points behind but the truth is it’s a poll that is based on last year’s data, last year’s selectorate.
“A third of those voters have not yet voted, so there’s a long way to run in the race and our data, the polling that we’ve been doing, the phone-banking that we’ve been doing, shows that this is still balanced on a knife edge, that it’s 50-50.”
Corbyn’s campaign continues on Saturday with an event in Ramsgate, Kent, where he will talk of the need to develop the renewable energy industry in coastal communities.
He will call for a debate about how to “restore pride and prosperity to those places in so-called left-behind Britain”, and pledge a new regional investment bank for the south-east that will focus on turning around places that have been on the wrong side of government decisions.
“For Ramsgate, like other coastal towns, that commitment to invest means opening up the opportunities that are there,” he will say. “We have huge natural resources in the UK, a world-beating history of scientific research and technological development – including for many years at the Sandwich centre, just down the road from here. And we have talent that is simply going to waste at present because of a lack of investment.”
