LBC radio caller says he was driven to vote Labour by Daily Mail's negative coverage of Jeremy Corbyn

Right-wing media accused of smear campaign against opposition leader

A member of the public who says he voted for the first time in the 2017 general election has told LBC he chose Jeremy Corbyn after reading negative headlines about him in the Daily Mail.

Speaking to the radio station, caller Ibrahim blasted the right-wing newspaper for scare-mongering and said it had the opposite of its intended effect of swaying him towards the Tories.

Recent headlines from the paper include “Corbyn’s fantasy land”, talking down his socialist proposals, and labelling Mr Corbyn, John McDonnell and the former shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott “apologists for terror”.

"Every time I read the Daily Mail, all they do is to try to talk nonsense about Jeremy Corbyn," said Ibrahim.

“The more they talked about him, the more I liked him.

”When the election started, I had never heard him talk before. But when he started talking, I had a connection with him.

“So that’s the reason that motivated me [to vote for him].”

He said the Daily Mail focused more on the negatives of Mr Corbyn rather than the potential positive outcomes of voting for the Conservatives.

The caller's remarks follow an astounding rise for the Labour party after months of persistent negativity in the press and Mr Corbyn's own colleagues calling for him to resign.

Labour gained 34 seats last week, including in traditional Tory strongholds such as Kensington and Canterbury, leaving the Conservatives without an overall majority.

Theresa May visited Buckingham Palace on Friday to propose a deal with Northern Ireland’s DUP in order to prop up the Tories’ majority in Parliament.

As rumours swirled around how long Ms May would last in the top job, Mr Corbyn's success prompted the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson to write in The Sun that Mr Corbyn “did not win the election”.

He argued the Tories won more votes than Tony Blair in the landslide of 1997, and boasted that his party had won back Clwyd South despite the fact they actually lost the constituency to Labour.