FORMER South Dorset MP Lord Knight has called on the Labour Party to overhaul its leadership strategy after it suffered a crushing defeat in the General Election.

Jim Knight, who served as Labour MP for South Dorset for nearly 10 years and lost to to Richard Drax in 2010, has urged party chiefs to think carefully about who spearheads Labour ahead of the next election in 2020.

Labour suffered a crushing defeat in last week’s election gaining 232 seats compared to the Conservatives’ 331, losing all but one of its seats in Scotland to the Scottish National Party (SNP). Leader Ed Miliband resigned sparking a leadership contest, the winner of which will be announced in September.

Lord Knight has called on the party to appoint a temporary leader for two years to allow it to regroup, and to then hold another leadership election in two or three years time.

Writing in his blog, Lord Knight said: "My political friends will call me naïve. But I would love to have a candidate declare that he or she will do the job we need doing for the next two or three years and then will open up a new leadership election. He or she may run again and can be judged on a record of reviving the party’s fortunes, and in comparison with the likely new Prime Minister.”

Speaking to the Echo, Lord Knight said he felt the reason Labour lost the election so badly was because the Conservative party “played on the fear” of a Labour and SNP coalition.

He added: “Another reason (the Tories) won was because over the past five years, despite academic research, they successfully managed to persuade people the recession was Labour’s fault and undermine our economic competence, and we never fully managed to address that.

"There is also some truth in that we were too much in the comfort zone with some of our policies, and some of them were not strong enough.”

Lord Knight said he felt Mr Miliband, who resigned the day after the election, had done the right thing in stepping down and now urged the party to look forward, but said he didn’t have a preferred choice of who should take over.

He said: “I thought Ed Miliband grew massively during the campaign and grew more confident within himself.

“I do however think he did the right thing in taking responsibility and stepping down, and now what we need to do is look forward,

“We need to find someone who will put in the really hard work for the party to get us back into a position where we can win the election, and then run another contest to see who should take us through that election.

“We need to find the right person to take the party forward.”

CONTACT ME:

t: 01305 830987

e: lee.irving@dorsetecho.co.uk

Twitter: @DorsetEchoLee