Woman shaking up leadership campaign

Shaking the raindrops from her waterproof jacket, its oversized hood nearly covering her eyes, Lisa Nandy bundled into the Willow Tree Cafe with a smile and an easy hello.

Nandy, 40, a Labour politician, is vying for her party’s leadership and was here to meet with residents of this small town in West Yorkshire that had been devastated by flooding just days earlier.

As she sat with local leaders over a cup of tea to discuss the effect and the logistics of rebuilding a region in crisis, her brow furrowed as they listed their concerns.

But another crisis was also front of mind for Nandy: the one facing Great Britain’s Labour Party, which is still reeling from a December election that saw its support base in northern England crumble and delivered its worst result since 1935, spelling the end of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

“I said when I launched the election campaign, if Labour doesn’t change, we will die, and we will deserve to,” she said in a recent interview. “And I think it is that serious for the Labour Party.”

Younger, female and from the north of England herself, Nandy — daughter of Luise Fitzwalter, a former journalist and local Labour councilor, and Dipak Nandy, a prominent Marxist academic born in India — is a portrait of just how different the party leadership could look.

Though she often jokes that at home she is considered the one on the right, she is a socially liberal, center-left contender in a field that leans further to the left.

Her remaining rivals — Keir Starmer, Labour’s Brexit policy leader under Corbyn, and Rebecca Long-bailey, who served as Corbyn’s business secretary — are seen as more closely aligned with the party’s left wing, and Starmer is considered the clear favorite to prevail.

But with analysts pointing to Labour’s betrayal of its workingclass roots in England’s industrial north and a slide toward Londoncentered left-wing politics under Corbyn as the reason for its steep losses, Nandy offers an alternative — albeit most likely for the future. She is calling for change within a party that she sees as “far too top-heavy” and “far too disconnected.”

“I think the challenge that we face in Britain is very similar to the challenge that the left faces across much of the world,” Nandy said, “and no different actually to the challenge in the U.S. about reconnecting to people outside of the major cities.”

Arguably the least recognizable of the candidates heading into the contest, she made waves with a formidable performance during a sit-down with famed BBC interviewer Andrew Neil in January. (Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s refusal to appear on Neil’s show caused a stir before the general election.)

Since then, Nandy’s momentum has continued to build. In a straw poll of the audience after the most recent Sky News debate between the three candidates, Nandy was the clear crowd favorite. Speaking on BBC, prominent political commentator George Monbiot described Nandy as his preferred candidate with “a lovely touch” who “gets the collaborative nature of what politics now need to be.”

During her visit to Sowerby Bridge, she won the praise — if not the outright endorsement — of Holly Lynch, the Labour lawmaker who represents the area.

“I think what Lisa is saying and what she is doing absolutely resonates with people,” Lynch said as the two toured a local cheese factory that had been disrupted by the flooding. She described Nandy as “grounded” and “quite funny at times, qualities that you don’t see in leaders of political parties.”

Whether that praise will translate to votes as members begin casting their ballots remains to be seen, and a recent opinion poll from the Yougovresearch group confirmed that Starmer remained firmly in the lead ahead of Labour’s announcement of its new leader April 4.

But for now, Nandy is having a moment. She has drawn attention as she made the case for taxing wealth, abolishing the monarchy and vowing to move Labour not further toward the center but further toward the north.

This ethos at the core of her leadership pitch emphasizes a shift in the party’s focus to the U.K.’S largely working-class towns and smaller cities that are often left behind, a move that she believes Labour must make in order to survive.

As industry disappeared from these former mining and manufacturing communities over the past four decades, young people left for the big cities, leaving behind huge numbers of older voters who feel disconnected from the political system, she said. At the same time, the party’s other main wing of socially liberal urban youths face their own issues of high housing costs and strains on public services.

“They’re two sides of the same coin,” Nandy said. “You’ve got to be able to connect with both, and you’ve got to be able to speak for both.”

She believes she is the right candidate to offer those solutions by “investing in one area in order to alleviate the pressure on others,” an approach that, as she puts it, “solves a whole set of problems.”

Nandy was born in Manchester and grew up there and in the nearby town of Bury, and has spent the last decade representing the northern town of Wigan, where she lives with her partner, Andy Collis, and their 4-year-old son, Otis.

Liberal politics have always been part of her life. Her father was born in Kolkata and came to Great Britain in the 1950s to study at the University of Leeds. (Running short of money, he was taken in there by one of his professors, Arnold Kettle, an avowed communist and father of Martin Kettle, who is now a columnist with The Guardian.)

Dipak Nandy went on to become the first director of the Runnymede Trust think tank on race and helped draft Great Britain’s Race Relations Bill of 1976.

Lisa Nandy’s pedigree also includes her maternal grandfather, Frank Byers, who was a Liberal member of Parliament and went on to lead his party in the House of Lords. Her stepfather, Ray Fitzwalter, was a revered investigative journalist.

She lived her early adult years in London and worked at homelessness and children’s charities before entering politics.