By Glen Owen and Brendan Carlin for The Mail on Sunday
Published: 23:41 GMT, 9 March 2019 | Updated: 23:41 GMT, 9 March 2019
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Jeremy Corbyn will be forced to step down soon as Labour leader, triggering a bitter succession battle, allies of his deputy Tom Watson have claimed.
Mr Watson is understood to be secretly preparing for a titanic leadership showdown with Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, believing that Mr Corbyn will be forced out because of the growing furore over anti-Semitism.
A battle between Mr Watson and Mr McDonnell would pit two of the party’s most brutal political operators against each other: hardman Watson, 52, who has an unrivalled grip on Labour’s levers of power, going head-to-head with Marxist McDonnell, 67, who has been a close ally and enforcer for Corbyn for more than three decades.
Labour insiders believe that Jeremy Corbyn could be on the verge of resigning as party leader
It comes as Mr Watson prepares to launch a new ‘social democratic’ group of Labour MPs in the coming days, which Corbyn loyalists describe as an attempt to create a ‘party within a party’.
Mr Corbyn was shaken last week by the decision of the UK’s human rights watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), to examine Labour’s record on anti-Semitism. Labour MPs predict that it will lead to ‘heads rolling’, amid disputed claims of papers being shredded and ‘boxes of documents’ being carried out of
