David Miliband: Corbyn trying to "wreck" Keir Starmer's Labour leadership

David Miliband, the former foreign secretary who now leads the International Rescue Committee, has spoken to Matt Chorley on Times Radio about Lebanon, migrants crossing the channel and Labour.

On Corbyn claim Labour staff sabotaged the 2017 election:

“This is a pure wrecking tactic from Jeremy Corbyn and the Corbynite's denial after four successive defeats is a route to more defeats.

“We learned that after 1992, we got out of denial and we won in ‘97. Actually, we won three elections on the trot.

“When people got to look at Labour in 2017, we couldn't beat the worst Tory campaign in history… and then when people got the full measure of Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, he led us to the worst election defeat since the 1930s. So it's a wrecking tactic, and I hope people understand it for what it is.”

On asking the French for help with boat crossings:

"Taking back control is put under the microscope here because the first sentence is 'take back control'. The second sentence says, 'we've got to get the French to do more'. And so you're immediately into a reality of the modern world that... you rely on other people doing things."

On rejecting the Australian approach of pushing boats back from British waters:

"The bigger the wall, the more desperate the measures to get around them. And remember the distance from Australia to Indonesia is many times that of the distance from Dover to Calais. So cooler heads need to prevail if the UK is to sustain an effective response, as well as a humane response, because the law of the sea that says that anyone who is in distress needs to be picked up is there for a reason."