PETER Kyle has said he wants to work with party leader Jeremy Corbyn - but insists he must change.

The Hove MP, the only Labour representative in Sussex, was speaking to The Argus after Corbyn was re-elected party leader on Saturday with an increased mandate.

Mr Kyle, who has been an outspoken critic of Corbyn, had backed failed leadership rival Owen Smith.

However, he said he would "bite his hand off" at the offer of working together with his leader in the future.

He said: "Jeremy has said he will be reaching out to people who have opposed him. There are a lot of things I would like to talk to him about.

"I will be saying to Jeremy - should he take me up on the offer of a conversation - let's talk about giving power to services rather than activists.

"His mandate is to do something, not to be something. The public need a different Jeremy Corbyn leading the Labour party to the one who has been leading it."

Corbyn won 61.8 per cent of the vote (compared to his 59.5 per cent last year).

He vowed to bring Labour back together, saying "we have much more in common than divides us", insisting the party could win the next election as the "engine of progress" in the country.

Mr Kyle added: "It's clear the Labour membership is sending out a message about where it wants to go. MPs, including me, still have a different view about where we go and the challenge Jeremy has now is how he brings these two sides together."

The Hove MP hit the headlines last week following the broadcast of two documentaries into the future of the Labour party.

In Channel 4's Dispatches programme, chairman-elect of the local Labour party, Mark Sandell, told of plans to unseat Mr Kyle because of differences with Corbyn.

But yesterday, Mr Kyle said he was not worried about being de-selected.

He said: "I honestly don't think about my own position. I don't sit around mulling over the possibility of deselection.

"I will always be OK because I have a great CV.

"But I'm not flippant about the prospect of losing this job. If I only have five years as an MP I don't want to look back and think I wasted a single day of it."

He added that he was not surprised at the result but said the "clock is ticking" ahead of the next election.

He said: "The future and the healing has got to be around politics and a direction of travel which brings Labour closer to the electorate.

"We are now a year closer to the election and that means a year closer to facing the electorate. The clock is ticking."

LABOUR MUST UNITE TO EMERGE FROM WILDERNESS

A SENIOR Labour councillor on Brighton and Hove City Council has called on party factions to unite in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership victory.

Councillor Tom Bewick, chairman of the children, young people and skills committee, said Corbyn must lead the party out of the wilderness.

He said: “All the different factions must now respect his mandate and, above all, unite. The Tories are the real opposition to progress in our country, not long-serving members that once supported Tony Blair.

“The wider public, at the ballot box, will decide the true test of Labour’s shift to the radical left. If we start to pick up seats and go ahead in the polls then internal party critics will be silenced.”

Council leader Warren Morgan was not available for comment.

Elsewhere London mayor Sadiq Khan warned that a failure to unite leadership contest could kill off Labour for ever, while prominent moderate Chuka Umunna said the party cannot win a general election unless it stays a “broad church”.

Mr Khan said: “We know from history - the Gang of Four in the 1980s - that when the Labour Party splits, we are out of power for a generation. Now, it is far more serious than that. If if the Labour Party splits, it could be the end of the Labour Party.”

Streatham MP Mr Umunna told BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show: “We’ve got to move on from this notion of crushing people who disagree with us.

“The strength of the party is that it is a broad church. Under our first-past-the-post electoral system... you can only win if you are a broad church political party, and for the Labour Party you have to take in everyone from the left to the centre-left.”