LABOUR leadership candidates “who wouldn’t touch workers with a bargepole” tried to muscle their way onto the Durham Miners’ Gala platform at the last minute, the Morning Star can reveal.

Organisers invited only Jeremy Corbyn and deputy hopeful Tom Watson to address the crowd as both had been nominated by the Durham Miners Association for the top jobs.

But rivals Andy Burnham, Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper, who support continuing with a degree of Tory austerity and renewing Britain’s nuclear weapons, turned up anyway.

The Star has learnt that Mr Burnham’s advisers confronted organisers and asked if he could be a late addition to the running. After a last-minute meeting, the request was refused.

Mr Burnham had previously snubbed an approach from the National Union of Mineworkers asking if he would be willing to speak, a senior party source said.

Durham Miners Association general secretary David Hopper told the assembly he was “sick to death of people who wouldn’t touch us with a bargepole phoning us asking to speak.”

All remaining candidates reportedly made such requests.

“As long as I’m general secretary of this union, there’ll be no rightwingers here,” Mr Hopper said.

“They need never pick up the phone again.”

Mr Hopper later told the Star there had been significant “pressure applied” by the candidates’ camps.

“The miners took a decision to support Tom Watson … and Jeremy Corbyn, who has a long history of supporting causes close to our hearts,” he said.

Mr Corbyn said speaking at the rally was “the greatest honour of my life.”

“It’s the duty and responsibility of whoever leads the unions and the Labour Party to be at the gala to show our support to those we are supposed to represent,” he said.

He paid tribute to the leading role played by miners in struggles throughout history.

“When we look at our NHS and the principles of the welfare state, it’s on (the miners’) shoulders it was built,” he said.

When an aide of Ms Cooper approached the miners’ association with a request for their boss to speak, they were reportedly told by an organiser: “If you swim across that river, underwater, right to the other side and you come up alive … you still won’t get an invite to the Durham Miners’ Gala.”