Corbyn aides deny claims over “top secret” mega-poll on leader’s future

Aides to Jeremy Corbyn have denied claims the Labour leader has paid for a huge secret poll on whether he should step down before the 2020 general election.

They used a Twitter account to criticise as “entirely untrue” a newspaper report that Corbyn had paid for a “top secret” survey of 10,000 people which would be kept away from the shadow cabinet.

The poll is ten times the size of the normal 1,000-strong political poll to “canvass views on his own future”, the Mirror reported.

“The whole thing is absolutely top secret – no-one is supposed to know about it,” a source told the newspaper.

Today, however, Corbyn’s staff used a twitter account to rubbish the story.

“This MirrorOnline story is entirely untrue. No such questions about jeremycorbyn have been commissioned in any such poll,” wrote the Labour Leader Media account.

The spat comes after a series of weak poll ratings for Labour, with the party stuck in the mid-twenties, and ahead of by-elections in Stoke-on-Trent and Copeland this week.

Yesterday key Corbyn ally Diane Abbott told Sky News she is “confident” that the party leader will stay on for the 2020 general election.

“These are difficult by-elections, they are going to be quite tight. We are hopeful of winning both of them but it is really important that every Labour supporter comes out to vote and if we lose one or we lose both I think the party will go forward, it has to go forward,” she said.