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Fine and Nandy
Some people forget that Lisa Nandy is the only BAME candidate in the Labour leadership race. But GMB union members certainly didn’t forget today, as the Wigan MP delivered the crucial hustings performance that all but guaranteed she will now be on the final ballot paper.
I’m told that Nandy drew the loudest, longest applause of any candidate during two key points: when she talked of minority ethnic rights and when she talked of her own mixed race heritage. Her father Deepak Nandy was the academic who wrote the Harold Wilson government’s 1976 Race Relations Act. But he was also the radical activist who staged sit-ins at a racist pub in Leicester in the 1960s. Her description of his struggles and her backstory was ‘the moment she won the room’, I’m told.
Nandy’s own combination of intellect and radicalism ought to be catnip to the middle-class base of today’s Labour party. At the same time, her northern roots and constituency can help it reconnect with the Leave-voting working classes who switched to the Tories. In theory, that all makes her the perfect unity candidate. Yet while she may be the media’s current darling, she’s barely hitting double figures in polls of members.
The GMB’s endorsement means she can at least get out in front of the hundreds of thousands of members who simply haven’t heard much about her. Her campaign has always insisted that the more people know her, the more they like her. That theory, which has to contend with the brute numbers already backing Keir Starmer and Rebecca Long-Bailey, will be stress-tested to the limit in coming weeks, though the real fear must be that it’s already too late to change minds.
Still, an excellent day for Nandy was capped by a Channel 4 News focus group of ex-Labour voters tonight, showing unanimous support for her as the candidate to best win back their votes (although Emily Thornberry did well too). The comments for Starmer (“corporate”, “boring”) and Long-Bailey (“Corbyn clone” “angry”) were less than flattering. In a striking tumbleweed moment, not a single hand went up for Long-Bailey at the end. But only a couple went up for Starmer too. If he does win this thing, he’s got a lot of work to do with focus groups like that.
But the Channel 4 focus group was made up of members of the public, not members of the Labour party. And Long-Bailey right now is hammering home her advantage among the Corbyn core support. Tonight she focused on Labour’s own internal processes, coming out firmly in favour of ‘open selections’ (seen by some in the PLP as a recipe for mass deselections) that proves she’s not so much the Corbyn candidate as the Momentum candidate.
Long-Bailey has a formidable ground operation around her already and once Unite and the CWU back her, she will get all the office space (for phone banking and more) and logistical help that any candidate needs. The CLP nomination meetings have barely started and most of Starmer’s are from parties that didn’t nominate Corbyn. Next Thursday and the following Thursday will see scores of them in play, and Long-Bailey’s support may spike. Crucially, her team think Nandy’s second preferences are more likely to go to her than Starmer.
As for Jess Phillips, her candidacy proved why party leadership contests are so important as the nearest thing the UK gets to ‘primaries’. Theresa May famously never had to battle it out with her rivals for rank and file votes in 2017 and was never tested as a result. Phillips’s brief encounter with this process showed that you really need not just ‘bold’ charisma and bottle (she had both) but the hard graft too of organisation and policy.
The great irony of her campaign was that she suffered from exactly the same faults that she often accused Corbyn of: lots of strident opposition (to Corbynism as much as to Johnsonism) but few credible, thought-out solutions. Phillips was admirably honest about her own failings, and may yet get a shadow cabinet post that lets her develop as a frontline politician rather than a star of the backbenches.
Phillips won’t get to find out if the 105,000 surge in party membership really is made up of centrists longing for a real break with the Corbyn personnel and record. Starmer is now well placed to pick up that kind of support, if Nandy fails to break through to the wider public consciousness. If she does get more profile, however, those members may realise she’s now the only candidate who was not part of the Corbyn project or shadow cabinet of 2019. She’s also ‘the only non-lawyer left in the race’, one ally jokes.
Can a fresh-face, clean-break candidate win this contest? The odds are still against her on that. With Phillips out of the race, Nandy is the ‘change-or-die’ candidate (those were her words to the PLP). A Labour party that prides itself on its radicalism about the world may end up being pretty conservative about its own leadership, preferring the evolutionary approach of Starmer or Long-Bailey to the potential revolution of Nandyism.
Channel 4 has its own Labour hustings on February 17, five days before the ballot opens. The TV programme (featuring genuine debate and more than 40 second replies) may reach more party members than any of its own official livestreamed events with relatively tiny audiences. For Nandy it could be the last roll of the dice. But after today, at least she’s in the game.
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