Labour hit by resignations as three Corbyn ministers quit over defence policy

Emily Thornberry, who like Mr Corbyn is against Trident, will take on the defence brief in her place. We have had a long discussion about how we approach foreign policy issues, we are not in hugely different places.

Shadow rail minister Jonathan Reynolds and shadow foreign office minister Steve Doughty quit, saying they agreed with Pat McFadden, the Europe spokesman sacked late last night for alleged disloyalty. Friends denied conditions had been put on his continued shadow cabinet membership.

Labour’s elected deputy leader Tom Watson led a chorus of senior figures bemoaning the “loss” of Mr Dugher, a close ally of former prime minister Gordon Brown, from the shadow cabinet. Corbyn, he said, had taken them as a personal attack.

Mr Corbyn compared his sacking of various shadow front-benchers as a board game and signed off the negotiations over text message.

Four months into Corbyn’s tenure following his surprise leadership election win, Corbyn sacked two frontbench moderates for alleged disloyalty and demoted his defence spokeswoman with one commentator calling the situation inside the party “nuts”. Eagle was replaced by Emily Thornberry, who has questioned the need to replace Trident.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has revealed he put the finishing touches to his reshuffle by sending text messages on Wednesday evening as he was about to deliver a speech – more than two days after the process began.

“It’s a choice for him, in some ways I think it’s the right choice to make if he doesn’t agree with Jeremy, but if he’s using the example of Stop the War as a threat to national security I think that’s a completely bogus reason for resigning”.

Paraphrasing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, a poem in which an albatross carries a curse on the crew of a ship, Mr Cameron said: “Never mind how many Eagles we end up with, I think you have all worked out you’ve got an albatross at the head of your party”.

A historic change in the reshuffle was the appointment of Ms Thornberry as defence spokesman – the first supporter of unilateral nuclear disarmament in that position for three decades. No one forces them to kill innocent people in Paris or Beirut. Labour’s former policy chief and MP for Dagenham and Rainham, Jon Cruddas, told BBC Radio 4’s The World This Weekend that speculation about a shadow cabinet reshuffle had distracted the party from focusing on scrutinising the government’s management of the floods in northern England.

The shadow chancellor said Mr McFadden had “distorted” the Labour leader’s views on a number of occasions and turned it into a “personalised” attack.

MP John Woodcock meanwhile wrote on Twitter: “If you can’t state these views and be a shadow minister then our party really is being driven off a cliff”.

But Mr Corbyn faced accusations he was using the reshuffle to exact revenge on his detractors.

Asked for Mr Corbyn’s reaction to the resignations, a senior Labour source said: “He will be thanking those people for their service and the filling the vacancies”.