Corbyn victory plotted in West Norfolk

Newspapers have reported that the little known Richard Murphy is the main architect of his economic plan.

The Guardian newspaper described Mr Murphy, a self-employed accountant who lives with his GP wife and two teenage children in Downham, as “the man behind Corbynomics”.

It reports that Mr Murphy has forged a reputation over more than a decade as a pugnacious and effective campaigner against tax evasion. It suggests he could even be a future Chancellor of the Exchequer under a Corbyn-led Labour government, although it says he has said he is not interested in such roles.

It quotes him speaking last weekend in Cambridge at a Corbyn rally and saying: “How is it that the UK’s top bosses are paid 183 times more than the average worker in this country? This is because right now we let those bosses do what they like with our public companies,” he argued.

“For 30 or more years we have been told about Tina – that There Is No Alternative [to mainstream economics] … You came tonight for a rally. Well, actually I want to tell you that you came for a funeral. Tina is dead. Tonight, I tell you there is an alternative.”

Mr Murphy, an economics graduate from Ipswich, has written a number of academic books and was a founder director of a company that once held the European licence for the game Trivial Pursuit.

The Guardian said: “He has recently reinvented himself more as an economist, writing The Courageous State, a polemical book about the role of governments and markets, which even included, as he modestly points out himself, a draft budget speech for a future chancellor. Another book, The Joy of Tax, will follow shortly.”

It says the heart of “Corbynomics” is what he calls “people’s QE”, a policy of using money created by the Bank of England to invest in public infrastructure projects, at the same time as boosting employment and economic growth.

Mr Corbyn won on the first round with 59.5 per cent of the vote. Andy Burnham was a distant second with 19 per cent, Yvette Cooper 17 per cent and Liz Kendall 4.5 per cent.