All In: The must-read manifesto for the future of Britain

Product Information

I’ve been here before, Tom. I live in Wigan! You’re supposed to be helping with my PR – you’ve f***ed up with that one!” See also: “I often spend my time sounding like a Lib Dem”: Rory Stewart on the fractured Tory party] The odds of Lisa Nandy becoming the next Labour Party leader currently seem low. But it’s still worth looking into her record, which should raise some big red flags for the Labour left. The right won in 2019. But will it win in 2020 too? When we spoke on Zoom I asked her whether she would run for the leadership again. She flipped her iPad round and showed me a crawl space under her desk – which is leather-topped and once belonged to her grandfather, the life peer. “There is definitely a bit of me that, when I’m asked if I want to run again, really wants to climb into this little hole – and I could get into it, if I thought about it seriously,” she said, meaning the hole and not the question. When pressed, she said that she saw her 2020 bid as a valuable corrective to the pro-Corbyn consensus. “It was a long shot. I’d stood in opposition to the party line on both anti-Semitism – which is why I left the shadow cabinet – and on Brexit. So I could see it was an unlikely prospect.”

All In by Lisa Nandy | Waterstones

Reportedly spoke at Blue Labour’s 2016 conference (though she has allegedly said its ideology isn’t the answer to Britain’s problems). Nandy agreed to film with them, but returned looking disarranged: the crew wanted her to stand in front of the one boarded-up shop they could find. She refused until they re-angled the camera.The shadow minister made it a point to say that both are great leaders, with differing personalities and ways of leading politics. Why don’t you just call my mother and tell her how much I’m failing?” said Flower, beaten down. The NS Summer Special, out 29 July. Illustration by Cold War Steve Lisa Nandy is known for her defence of community and local people. Indeed, she made it a key part of her pitch to be Labour leader in 2020. This is why it is so good to see her vision captured in written form in her book All In . This rally call highlights the challenges we face as a country through the prism of community and how, despite the odds, a real difference can be made if we work together. Community is something many people believe has diminished in recent decades. Nandy makes this point throughout the book.

Lisa Nandy MP announces book talk and signing in Neston Lisa Nandy MP announces book talk and signing in Neston

Was she afraid levelling up would now be entirely abandoned by the Conservatives? “I’m not remotely worried about the agenda disappearing,” she said. “If anything, the problem has become more acute. It’s widely accepted now that the only way to solve the problems we have is through creating growth in the economy. You can’t do that by writing off most people in most places.” The former Labour minister Margaret Hodge told me Nandy was “one of the great assets of the shadow front bench. With Yvette Cooper, Wes Streeting and Rachel Reeves, we finally have real depth and capability”. She praised Nandy’s “sensitive political judgement. When she was doing the foreign office job, she navigated the very difficult issue of Israel-Palestine. She managed, in a fringe meeting at Conference for the Labour Friends of Israel, to get tumultuous applause when she talked about the rights of Palestinians. That’s quite a feat.” The trust is financially independent, Flower told me, employing 60 staff across 13 programmes that range from four-year-olds with school-readiness issues to a football team for the children of Afghan refugees. In this brilliant and accessible intervention, Lisa Nandy reveals how Britain can leave behind the mess in which we find ourselves. All In charts a course towards a fairer, more equal, more prosperous country by drawing on the greatest asset we have – each other. Maybe (probably!) I'm just irredeemably wonkish, but I just think that the electorate will spot the hole in "we need to be honest about what we can afford, instead of talking about halving or scrapping tuition fees" *five minutes later* "of course, I will scrap tuition fees".This number sees a sharp rise when you look at the members of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority – which is made up of leaders of each GM council. Most interesting was Nandy pointing out how, typically, our western discourse focuses on the 1980s when the US and the UK shifted to the right which signalled the end of the Post-War Consensus and the beginning of the current capitalist system. However, throughout the book, Nandy also includes the opening up of the Chinese economy at this time as a factor which has shaped recent decades. This inclusion helps us understand these changes in a more global context and is welcome. The reason I don’t talk that much about being a woman in politics, or being a mum, or about my dad, is really simple: I didn’t come into politics to talk about myself. My mum’s from Surrey, my dad’s from Calcutta – he still calls it Calcutta – so I don’t know where I fit in terms of the race spectrum, and the privilege debate. I’m Manchester by birth, I’m a Wiganer by choice – so being northern is an important part of my identity. Rebecca Long-Bailey is the progressive frontrunner, with numerous promising policies. But she’s already alienated many left-wingers by capitulating to some of her opponents’ demands. Outside the fish and chip shop, Nandy was approached by TalkTV, which had come to Wigan to respond to the Mail’s hatchet job. “I think they stitched you up,” a slightly sweaty presenter told her. “I’m from South Shields – you should see the high street there. Or Corby, where my missus is from.”