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Mr McCluskey is General Secretary of one of the UK’s largest trade unions, Unite the Union, and has remained one of Jeremy Corbyn’s most ardent supporters. His union ,and others around the country, enjoyed a renewal under Mr Corbyn, as the Labour Party gravitated towards its traditional socialist roots and sought to pass power to the people.

Mr McCluskey was, in 2017, hopeful of a Labour victory.

The party rallied the nation and galvanised the support of the young – with Mr Corbyn becoming something of a cult of personality.

Yet two years later in the 2019 election and, running on largely the same manifesto, Labour suffered its worst defeat since 1935.

It marked an end to Mr Corbyn’s Labour and any hope for a left-leaning government in the UK for at least five years.

Although a bitter blow to the party, many recognised a gap in which the party could recoup, rebuild, and grow going into the 2020s.

Sir Keir Starmer has since become the party’s new leader.

Considered to be somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum, Sir Keir’s policies are still left-wing yet comparatively moderate.

This has left many party supporters hopeful that Labour will attract more support for 2024’s general election.

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For the unions, however, it will take longer to recover from the fall of their most enthusiastic supporter in decades.

Mr McCluskey, during his Oxford Union address earlier this year, revealed the extent to which he desired the party remain centred around Mr Corbyn’s 2017 election manifesto.

Eager to make those popular policies the mainstay of the party, he admitted that 2019 was indeed a long shot from 2017, and said: “I knew Labour wouldn’t win.

“As election day grew closer I was predicting that Boris Johnson would win a workable majority.

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“It had become evident to me that Labour’s slide as being the perceived Remain party, was going to give us some real problems in our northern and midland heartlands.

“There was a feeling of betrayal over Brexit.

“I’ve been trying for over a year to stop the Labour leadership from allowing the party to be pushed to abandon our 2017 general election pledges.

“It’s important when we talk about it that you keep 2017 – two and a half years ago – in the back of your mind.

“We’d gone then to the electorate on the basis of respecting the 2016 referendum and pledging to take us out of the EU if we’d won.

“We should’ve stuck with that while setting about winning over Remainers.

“The truth is Jeremy was in some difficulty.

“The vast majority of Labour Party members, 75 percent of them, were Remainers.”

Earlier on in the address, Mr McCluskey was adamant that Brexit had lost Labour the 2019 vote.

He said that although Mr Corbyn was “unpopular on doorsteps in many of our working class areas,” his policies were nonetheless “popular”.

Yet, he divulged: “What happened is, in an attempt to break through Brexit, Labour produced a manifesto which had far too many promises in the desperate hope that people would push Brexit to one side.

“I stick with my conviction that it was Brexit that lost it for us.

“It created a divided party and a fundamental disconnect between Labour and its heartlands.

“It fuelled the perception that Jeremy Corbyn was not a strong leader and caused people to disbelieve the credibility of pledges that only two years previously they’d seen and were prepared to embrace enthusiastically, and which brought us so close to the threshold of power.”

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