Lisa Nandy’s campaign launch has written a cheque she can’t cash.
If the Wigan MP wants to make the contest, she needs to rethink her approach.
PHOTO: GETTY
Lisa Nandy has formally announced her bid for the Labour leadership: with an article in her local newspaper, the Wigan Post. But also – if we’re being honest – actually with an article in the Guardian. The Wigan Post thing is just spin. I mean, it’s not bad spin, but it really just spin.
That’s both the point and the biggest weakness in Nandy’s campaign. Her pitch, essentially, is the Labour party’s electoral coalition is afflicted with a wasting disease and has been for at least a decade – and that she is the cure.
The problem though is that the argument that she can cure it is, at the moment, based solely on backstory. It’s based on the case that she is a change candidate from “not London” and ‘gets it’. The problem is that if your appeal is based on the spin of ‘Lisa Nandy gets towns, folksily launches in the Wigan Post’ and the reality is ‘Lisa Nandy: launches with an op-ed in the Guardian, just like everybody else’, then your campaign becomes one without a unique selling point. As I wrote about Phillips' launch earlier today, if you run as straight-talking, you've got to talk straight. If you run as wanting to do politics differently, you have to do it differently.
Because the awkward truth is that Nandy isn’t that different from the other candidates or from any other Labour MP. She went to London for a bit, worked for an MP, then in a third sector organisation for a bit, then came home and became the MP. There’s nothing wrong with any of that – but when your campaign is based on doing things differently from the rest of the field, when they all have the exact same CV as you, it risks blowing the whole enterprise up. You have to demonstrate change to run as change.
That difficult truth is one reason why Nandy is struggling to get the support of either the 21 Labour MPs or the trades union support she needs to be certain of making the ballot. Most Labour MPs also went to London for a bit, worked for a third sector organisation, then came home and became the MP, and it rubs many of them up the wrong way to be talked about as if they don’t get it. Add that to a YouGov poll showing her finishing bottom of the pack and it makes the trades unions reluctant to waste their nomination hopes on a no-hoper.
Nandy can turn it around but it means retooling her campaign: moving away from talking about what she is – someone who unlike her rivals ‘gets it’ – and demonstrating that she does actually have the cure: talking about policies, solutions, innovations, changes to how the party operates. This is one area where her real launch article in the Guardian is going in the right direction: talking about devolution and tackling the care crisis – though she’ll need to go further and have more detail, beyond just calling on the party to show “courage” on the issue.
Without change, Nandy’s leadership bid will be very short-lived indeed.
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