London: Anti-austerity socialist Jeremy Corbyn was trying to pick a shadow cabinet Sunday after winning the leadership of Britain’s Labour Party, in a leftward shift that finishes its centrism under Tony Blair.

The veteran left-winger created a buzz of excitement with his clear-cut victory that marks a break with the legacy of controversial former Prime Minister Blair and his ‘New Labour’ movement of the 1990s.

Corbyn—a 200/1 outsider at the start of the contest—was starting work Sunday on putting together a shadow cabinet, though several senior Labour figures have ruled themselves out from serving under him.

However, Labour’s new deputy leader, Tom Watson, told BBC television there was ‘zero chance’ of a successful coup against the new chief, saying moderates had to respect Corbyn’s ‘huge mandate’.

‘He wants to build a broad-based party, he wants a front bench that represents all the talents and all the views,’ said Watson, whose role involves overseeing party unity.

He said he hoped to persuade Corbyn of the merits of Britain staying within NATO and not going down the path of unilateral nuclear disarmament.

Senior Labour figures, including its previous leader Ed Miliband, have called for party unity, though he is among those who have ruled themselves out of serving on Labour’s frontbench.

‘Death of New Labour’

Corbyn, a 66-year-old bearded vegetarian and a veteran of protest politics, won the Labour leadership with 59.5 percent of the vote in a result that was hailed by the hard-left Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain.

‘Death of New Labour,’ read The Sunday Telegraph newspaper’s front-page headline.

‘Labour isn’t dead, Blairism is. Jeremy Corbyn finally killed it,’ the pro-Conservative weekly said, adding that Corbyn had defeated ‘boring Blairites’.

The Guardian’s columnist Rafael Behr said Blairism was ‘buried beneath the rubble and a different structural and cultural divide has been revealed.

‘It is between established Labour... and insurgent Labour, a complex hybrid of organised coup by dogged old warriors of the left and spontaneous, organic uprising by idealistic new recruits.’

Many commentators noted the vibrancy behind a Corbyn campaign that successfully harnessed the power of protest movements and social media.

Some 15,500 people have joined the Labour Party in the 24 hours since Corbyn’s election, general secretary Iain McNicol said, taking the membership to ‘325,000 and rising’.

‘A genuine buzz and excitement has surrounded the election of a British political leader,’ Dan Hodges wrote in the pro-Conservative Daily Telegraph, although he concluded the result would be ‘suicide’.

Corbyn was a dissenter against Blair’s ‘New Labour’, having rebelled against the party leadership more than 500 times since 1997.

Blair warned ahead of the leadership vote that Corbyn would be an ‘electoral disaster’.

 ‘Threat to security’

A co-founder of the Stop the War anti-war movement, Corbyn advocates unilateral nuclear disarmament, ending austerity and increasing public spending.

In his first pronouncement on Corbyn’s election, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron said Labour were dangerous for Britain.

‘The Labour Party is now a threat to our national security, our economic security and your family’s security,’ he said on his personal Twitter account.

In opposition since 1979, Blair won the Labour leadership in 1994, modernised the party and moved it on the centre ground, winning the 1997, 2001 and 2005 general elections.

The party was trounced under his successor Gordon Brown in 2010, with Cameron forming a coalition government. It lost further ground under Miliband in May.

Opinion polls predicted a hung parliament, but in swathes of marginal seats, voters swung to the Conservatives, leaving pollsters stunned.

Cameron’s centre-right party won enough seats in May to form a slim majority government, taking 330 of the 650 seats to Labour’s 232.

Corbyn is expected to receive a hero’s welcome at the Trades Union Congress on Tuesday, before facing Cameron in parliament on Wednesday.

TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady warned that Labour now had to regain the trust of workers.

Labour has to win back the trust of ordinary people,’ she said as the conference got under way.

‘Clearly we want to see somebody leading not only a party but leading the government that introduces policies that will make a real difference to working people’s lives.’