John McDonnell, the No. 2 figure in the U.K.’s Labour Party, said Saturday he won’t be part of the next shadow cabinet under a new party leader.
“We’ll all go now,” McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, told Sky News, noting it would be up to Jeremy Corbyn’s successor to appoint a new top team. “I won’t part of that shadow cabinet,” he added. “I’ve done my bit. We need to move on at that stage with that new leader.”
Corbyn said on Friday that he plans to step down as Labour leader “in the early part of next year.” In a separate interview on Friday, McDonnell ruled out serving as interim leader.
McDonnell said on Saturday that Labour “tried to bring the country together. It failed … We have to own that and then move forward.”
Declining to pin the blame for historic losses on Corbyn, McDonnell said it’s time for the party to start “listening to people” in the constituencies it lost. It wasn’t just Brexit, he added, but a “long history, of maybe 40 years of neglect.”