Actress Maureen Lipman has abandoned a lifetime’s support for Labour and announced she will vote for “almost any other” party at the general election.

In an interview with Standpoint magazine, she said: “For the first time in five decades, I shall not be voting Labour.”

The star of stage and screen took aim at the shadow cabinet, saying: “The Chuka, Harman, Burnham, Hunt, Balls brigade? I can’t, in all seriousness, go into a booth and put my mark on any one of them.”

But the prominent British Jew reserved her most hostile comments for the Labour leader’s decision to back a symbolic Commons vote in favour of recognising the state of Palestine.

She also criticised Mr Miliband, who is from a secular Jewish family, for eating a bacon sandwich days after declaring he wanted to learn more about the religion of his birth.

Revealing her Labour loyalities, Ms Lipman added that she suspected David Miliband would return to frontline politics “strengthened by his time out in the real world.”