Labour’s Jim McMahon holds Oldham West and Royton seat

Anti-war Labour MP Paul Flynn: “Real votes by real Oldham people is first public expression of doubt against Cameron’s dodgy dossier with his invented bogus battalions”.

The result was “very, very good” for Corbyn, said Watson, who urged dissident MPs to rally around the Labour leader.

Mr McMahon polled 17,209 votes, with Ukip’s John Bickley trailing in second on 6,487, giving Westminster’s newest MP a majority of 10,722.

The race was tipped to be a close contest between Labour and UKIP – but Labour held the seat and increased its share of the vote significantly since May’s election.

The organisation – the successor group to Mr Corbyn’s leadership campaign – had little impact on Labour, he said.

He pointed the finger at a large postal vote, of around a quarter of the total, and claimed that much of it came from local residents of Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin.

“As a veteran of over 30 by-elections I have never seen such a perverse result”.

Professor Grant said Labour would need to become more moderate if it has any chance of winning seats it failed to take in this year’s general election.

It is not the first time the UKIP leader has made controversial comments in recent weeks.

“Some boxes where 99% of the votes were for Labour and this does not seem to be consistent with modern liberal democracy”.

“Some of the things we’ve seen before in Birmingham and Tower Hamlets were happening in Oldham yesterday”. McMahon won a more commanding victory than his predecessor Michael Meacher, who gained the seat with 54.8 percent of the vote in the general election in May.

Last October Mr Bickley almost overturned an 11,000 Labour majority at the Heywood and Middleton by-election, losing by just 600 votes.

Imagine what they would have said if Labour had been hammered in Oldham West and Royton.

‘That would make it fair again.

“The other candidates weren’t from Oldham, and I think in by-elections these local factors weigh rather more heavily than they would in a general election”. ‘As the nearest we have to a Labour elder – he is getting on a bit, Ken – he should probably know that this is the week when we should be trying to bring people back together, but he is entitled to his opinions’. ‘The hard work starts now’.

Newly elected member of parliament for Oldham West and Royton, Jim McMahon, right, is greeted by supporters as British opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, centre, looks on outside Chadderton Town Hall in Chadderton, Oldham, northwest England, on December 4, 2015. “It’s a clear demonstration that Labour is the party working people trust”, he wrote.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn: “It shows the way we’ve driven the Tories back on tax credits, on police cuts, on their whole austerity agenda and narrative”.

And while Mr Corbyn appears honest in not wishing to inflame intimidation, his warning that MPs could find “no hiding place” after they had voted, simply fed into the hostility towards those colleagues, who supported airstrikes.

Mr Watson accused Mr Farage of “sour grapes”.

Asked if he was going to follow Mr Watson’s suggestion that he should calm down, Mr Livingstone replied: “Absolutely, because I have been often quite angry at some of the criticism that Jeremy’s had”. “If I was their candidate, I’d be telling them to keep him as far away from the constituency as possible”. “It was a decisive victory with our share of the vote going up”, he said.

The result discredited Corbyn’s internal critics, who had hoped a weak showing would help spark a leadership coup. “I think they’re a bit of an irrelevance in this debate”.