On a Thursday afternoon in June, Lisa Nandy headed to Knowsley Safari Park, half an hour’s drive from Wigan. She had been advised not to drive through the monkey enclosure in her silver Mini but she thought, you can’t go to a safari park and not go through the monkey enclosure. They had chewed through the little nozzles that squirt water at the windscreen; when she arrived at the Premier Inn in Wigan the next morning to pick me up, she was fresh from the garage, via a breakfast meeting with striking workers from Royal Mail.
As we drove down Wallgate towards Wigan Athletic Football Club, the shadow secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities admitted that she was writing a book. “I thought it was a great idea,” she said. “I had an image of myself in an oak-panelled room on a green leather chair. Turns out it was the worst idea I’d had since running for Labour leader.” In June 2016 Nandy was part of the mass walkout of the soft left from Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet before contesting the leadership in 2020, coming third after Keir Starmer and Rebecca Long Bailey.
She started writing the book during her time as shadow foreign secretary, whittling away at chapters on her phone at Crewe Station, while commuting between her constituency in Wigan and London. She began with Britain’s role after Brexit – Wigan voted Leave – but changed tack when she realised “that all depends on what kind of country we want to be”.
Nandy is now addressing issues she has been talking about for years as a co-founder of the think tank Centre For Towns, set up following the EU referendum to analyse levels of prosperity in towns across the UK. Yet she remains a mystery to many within her own party: a former rebel, immaculately on-message when the cameras roll; an intellectual so rooted in her community that she spends as little time in Westminster as possible.
“I had time on the back benches to think,” Nandy said. She has an above-average ability to negotiate ring roads and sustain detailed conversation at the same time. “Founding Centre for Towns had a lot to do with being fed up with hearing that people in towns were thick and racist. I knew there was a reason that my constituents in Wigan came to a different conclusion about the EU from those in David Lammy’s in Tottenham. Towns haven’t been winners for the last 20 years and we have to sort it out – this is what became ‘levelling up’.” She wrote to focus her thoughts. “I wanted to get out of reacting constantly to Westminster gossip and who’s up, who’s down. I wanted to think bigger, deeper and harder about the solutions.”
Is the book about Wigan? “No, it’s about the world!” she laughed. “It’s about how to fix the world!” There is a Refreshers chew bar in the car’s coin compartment.
“About the world” it may be, but Nandy’s book starts with the story of Wigan Athletic FC, which two years ago was sold to a Hong Kong-based consortium for £41m, but then – to everyone’s great confusion – was put into administration a month later. For a while, said Nandy, it looked as if she and Jonathan Jackson, the club’s former chief executive, were going to have to run it themselves. Might she have been Wigan’s Delia Smith? “I have never pretended to have the first clue what is happening on the pitch,” she said. “People forgive a lot in politics, but not complete inauthenticity.”
Meanwhile, buyers for the club were circling. “Some absolute wrong ’uns, and a lot of Tory donors on the phone, telling me they would do right by it.” At the last moment it was bought by Abdulrahman Al-Jasmi, a Bahrain-based businessman “who has no interest in football, but whose son-in-law fancied running a club”. Talal Al Hammad is often seen at games with a Wigan hat on, though he, too, lives in Bahrain. “Al-Jasmi is treating it as a long-term investment that belongs to the people of Wigan,” Nandy said as she pulled into a car park. “A lot of people say global is bad, foreign is bad. But it was the opposite for us.”
We walked through the smell of fresh paint to the offices of Wigan Athletic Community Trust, an outreach programme run under the direction of Tom Flower.
“Find us OK?” asked Tom, middle-aged, homely.
“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!”
In the presence of Flower, Nandy morphed into someone comically merciless, a precocious teenage daughter ribbing her dad. She pulled him up on a new sign.
“It needs to be lower,” she said. “It’s not in the eyeline. It looks like a bin exit.”
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.
“You haven’t mentioned girls yet,” Nandy cut in. “And,” said Flower, taking a deep breath, “50 per cent of our workforce is female; 46 per cent of participants are female, 50 per cent of our management team are female.”
“Not on the board, though,” said Nandy.
“A third of our trustees are female…”
“You know half the population is female?”
“Why don’t you just call my mother and tell her how much I’m failing?” said Flower, beaten down.
Nandy’s involvement with the club has deepened her appreciation of what football is, she told me: a direct line to a town’s industrial past and a multiplicity of social issues. In the club’s toilets there were posters advertising a support group for survivors of sexual assault, and another for women affected by other people’s alcoholism. “Men were the breadwinners in Wigan,” Nandy said. “Every MP and every councillor was a man. We had one of the highest domestic violence rates in the country – it is a generational problem, and it’s changing.”
Outside in a vast hangar, amid a heavy fug of AstroTurf and plimsolls, 30 local primary schools were playing a football tournament. Wigan Athletic’s mascot is Crusty the Pie; unfortunately they couldn’t reject the idea because it was chosen by the children. “They’re not going to have me run around kicking a football in heels, are they?” said Nandy on the way to the pitch. “They had me kicking a ball at eight months pregnant.” Like the Duchess of Cambridge? “No, like an old MP in a suit,” she said. “And the problem is, I’m competitive.”
Nandy has dimples; she is generally laughing. In front of a camera, she loses her natural ease. Appearances matter, she said – but by that she seemed to mean looking smart. “You have to be well turned-out as an MP. Corbyn didn’t go down well round here – they said he couldn’t even cut his hedge. Do you remember that picture of him in front of his hedge?
“I go quite shy when my picture is taken,” she admitted. “When I started out, someone told me, you’ve got a really fun personality and it’s not coming through in your clothes. But I thought people wouldn’t listen. There’s a whole generation of women I’ve come up alongside, Stella Creasy and Jess Phillips, who have made it OK for you to express more of your personality through your clothes.”
After a nose around the football tournament, I returned to Flower’s office to find that Nandy had called his mother. They have never met, but she follows Nandy’s career. “She remembers Harold Macmillan and Tony Blair and she thinks I’m the one to do it,” Nandy said – meaning lead Labour to victory. It is hard to say how much Nandy is teasing when she slips into this mode of mock pride; there is something almost nostalgically laddish about it. She hasn’t ruled out another crack at leadership, but won’t be drawn into saying so.
A Tannoy sounded. “Would Lisa Nandy please leave the building,” Flower told her. “Go and give someone else a hard time.”
Six days later Nandy sat at the back of a bus in Berlin with Anneliese Dodds, the chair of the Labour Party, and John Ashworth, the shadow work and pensions secretary, and watched the collapse of the Tory government on someone’s iPhone. She and her colleagues were there to learn about successful examples of national reconstruction and how these might be applied to “levelling up” in the UK. Now, the policy’s chief architect Michael Gove had been summarily fired and the Johnson government’s flagship plan cut free like a balloon.
“Here I am, with responsibility for everything and no one to shadow,” Nandy told me when we spoke days after Boris Johnson’s fall. “Wandering around, Armageddon-style, surveying the wreckage that the Tories have left, rebuilding brick by brick, alone.”
“Levelling up was killed off a long time ago,” she added; it was only ever an attempt to keep Red Wall voters within the Conservatives’ electoral coalition. “There was never an enthusiasm for it within the Conservative Party as a whole. It was an agenda that was driven by Johnson and, to some extent, Gove, because they knew it was the key to holding that coalition, and nothing deeper. When the levelling up white paper came out [in February], it looked as if Gove might win the battle with the Treasury. But No 10 came down comprehensively on the Treasury’s side and that was the end.” Rishi Sunak did not want to stump up the cash.
In interviews during the pandemic, while Grant Shapps’ Zoom background featured a Union flag and a red ministerial box, Nandy appeared in a white attic with, if memory serves, a single light bulb: the room gave nothing away. When we spoke in early July, I spotted an LS Lowry print in the background, but little else. She wore a stripy vest and shorts in the 30°C heat, and held a wind-up fan in the shape of a dog, given to her by her young son.
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.”
Well said Lisa
Boris has changed the Tory Party. His legacy will be a more right leaning party, more reminiscence of UKIP light. With Trus seeming gleeful to be fully embracing it.
of course you didn’t like the cults of blair and corbyn, because you’re more centre right than blair was.
4 comments
On a Thursday afternoon in June, Lisa Nandy headed to Knowsley Safari Park, half an hour’s drive from Wigan. She had been advised not to drive through the monkey enclosure in her silver Mini but she thought, you can’t go to a safari park and not go through the monkey enclosure. They had chewed through the little nozzles that squirt water at the windscreen; when she arrived at the Premier Inn in Wigan the next morning to pick me up, she was fresh from the garage, via a breakfast meeting with striking workers from Royal Mail.
As we drove down Wallgate towards Wigan Athletic Football Club, the shadow secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities admitted that she was writing a book. “I thought it was a great idea,” she said. “I had an image of myself in an oak-panelled room on a green leather chair. Turns out it was the worst idea I’d had since running for Labour leader.” In June 2016 Nandy was part of the mass walkout of the soft left from Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet before contesting the leadership in 2020, coming third after Keir Starmer and Rebecca Long Bailey.
She started writing the book during her time as shadow foreign secretary, whittling away at chapters on her phone at Crewe Station, while commuting between her constituency in Wigan and London. She began with Britain’s role after Brexit – Wigan voted Leave – but changed tack when she realised “that all depends on what kind of country we want to be”.
Nandy is now addressing issues she has been talking about for years as a co-founder of the think tank Centre For Towns, set up following the EU referendum to analyse levels of prosperity in towns across the UK. Yet she remains a mystery to many within her own party: a former rebel, immaculately on-message when the cameras roll; an intellectual so rooted in her community that she spends as little time in Westminster as possible.
“I had time on the back benches to think,” Nandy said. She has an above-average ability to negotiate ring roads and sustain detailed conversation at the same time. “Founding Centre for Towns had a lot to do with being fed up with hearing that people in towns were thick and racist. I knew there was a reason that my constituents in Wigan came to a different conclusion about the EU from those in David Lammy’s in Tottenham. Towns haven’t been winners for the last 20 years and we have to sort it out – this is what became ‘levelling up’.” She wrote to focus her thoughts. “I wanted to get out of reacting constantly to Westminster gossip and who’s up, who’s down. I wanted to think bigger, deeper and harder about the solutions.”
Is the book about Wigan? “No, it’s about the world!” she laughed. “It’s about how to fix the world!” There is a Refreshers chew bar in the car’s coin compartment.
“About the world” it may be, but Nandy’s book starts with the story of Wigan Athletic FC, which two years ago was sold to a Hong Kong-based consortium for £41m, but then – to everyone’s great confusion – was put into administration a month later. For a while, said Nandy, it looked as if she and Jonathan Jackson, the club’s former chief executive, were going to have to run it themselves. Might she have been Wigan’s Delia Smith? “I have never pretended to have the first clue what is happening on the pitch,” she said. “People forgive a lot in politics, but not complete inauthenticity.”
Meanwhile, buyers for the club were circling. “Some absolute wrong ’uns, and a lot of Tory donors on the phone, telling me they would do right by it.” At the last moment it was bought by Abdulrahman Al-Jasmi, a Bahrain-based businessman “who has no interest in football, but whose son-in-law fancied running a club”. Talal Al Hammad is often seen at games with a Wigan hat on, though he, too, lives in Bahrain. “Al-Jasmi is treating it as a long-term investment that belongs to the people of Wigan,” Nandy said as she pulled into a car park. “A lot of people say global is bad, foreign is bad. But it was the opposite for us.”
We walked through the smell of fresh paint to the offices of Wigan Athletic Community Trust, an outreach programme run under the direction of Tom Flower.
“Find us OK?” asked Tom, middle-aged, homely.
“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!”
In the presence of Flower, Nandy morphed into someone comically merciless, a precocious teenage daughter ribbing her dad. She pulled him up on a new sign.
“It needs to be lower,” she said. “It’s not in the eyeline. It looks like a bin exit.”
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.
“You haven’t mentioned girls yet,” Nandy cut in. “And,” said Flower, taking a deep breath, “50 per cent of our workforce is female; 46 per cent of participants are female, 50 per cent of our management team are female.”
“Not on the board, though,” said Nandy.
“A third of our trustees are female…”
“You know half the population is female?”
“Why don’t you just call my mother and tell her how much I’m failing?” said Flower, beaten down.
Nandy’s involvement with the club has deepened her appreciation of what football is, she told me: a direct line to a town’s industrial past and a multiplicity of social issues. In the club’s toilets there were posters advertising a support group for survivors of sexual assault, and another for women affected by other people’s alcoholism. “Men were the breadwinners in Wigan,” Nandy said. “Every MP and every councillor was a man. We had one of the highest domestic violence rates in the country – it is a generational problem, and it’s changing.”
Outside in a vast hangar, amid a heavy fug of AstroTurf and plimsolls, 30 local primary schools were playing a football tournament. Wigan Athletic’s mascot is Crusty the Pie; unfortunately they couldn’t reject the idea because it was chosen by the children. “They’re not going to have me run around kicking a football in heels, are they?” said Nandy on the way to the pitch. “They had me kicking a ball at eight months pregnant.” Like the Duchess of Cambridge? “No, like an old MP in a suit,” she said. “And the problem is, I’m competitive.”
Nandy has dimples; she is generally laughing. In front of a camera, she loses her natural ease. Appearances matter, she said – but by that she seemed to mean looking smart. “You have to be well turned-out as an MP. Corbyn didn’t go down well round here – they said he couldn’t even cut his hedge. Do you remember that picture of him in front of his hedge?
“I go quite shy when my picture is taken,” she admitted. “When I started out, someone told me, you’ve got a really fun personality and it’s not coming through in your clothes. But I thought people wouldn’t listen. There’s a whole generation of women I’ve come up alongside, Stella Creasy and Jess Phillips, who have made it OK for you to express more of your personality through your clothes.”
After a nose around the football tournament, I returned to Flower’s office to find that Nandy had called his mother. They have never met, but she follows Nandy’s career. “She remembers Harold Macmillan and Tony Blair and she thinks I’m the one to do it,” Nandy said – meaning lead Labour to victory. It is hard to say how much Nandy is teasing when she slips into this mode of mock pride; there is something almost nostalgically laddish about it. She hasn’t ruled out another crack at leadership, but won’t be drawn into saying so.
A Tannoy sounded. “Would Lisa Nandy please leave the building,” Flower told her. “Go and give someone else a hard time.”
Six days later Nandy sat at the back of a bus in Berlin with Anneliese Dodds, the chair of the Labour Party, and John Ashworth, the shadow work and pensions secretary, and watched the collapse of the Tory government on someone’s iPhone. She and her colleagues were there to learn about successful examples of national reconstruction and how these might be applied to “levelling up” in the UK. Now, the policy’s chief architect Michael Gove had been summarily fired and the Johnson government’s flagship plan cut free like a balloon.
“Here I am, with responsibility for everything and no one to shadow,” Nandy told me when we spoke days after Boris Johnson’s fall. “Wandering around, Armageddon-style, surveying the wreckage that the Tories have left, rebuilding brick by brick, alone.”
“Levelling up was killed off a long time ago,” she added; it was only ever an attempt to keep Red Wall voters within the Conservatives’ electoral coalition. “There was never an enthusiasm for it within the Conservative Party as a whole. It was an agenda that was driven by Johnson and, to some extent, Gove, because they knew it was the key to holding that coalition, and nothing deeper. When the levelling up white paper came out [in February], it looked as if Gove might win the battle with the Treasury. But No 10 came down comprehensively on the Treasury’s side and that was the end.” Rishi Sunak did not want to stump up the cash.
In interviews during the pandemic, while Grant Shapps’ Zoom background featured a Union flag and a red ministerial box, Nandy appeared in a white attic with, if memory serves, a single light bulb: the room gave nothing away. When we spoke in early July, I spotted an LS Lowry print in the background, but little else. She wore a stripy vest and shorts in the 30°C heat, and held a wind-up fan in the shape of a dog, given to her by her young son.
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.”
Well said Lisa
Boris has changed the Tory Party. His legacy will be a more right leaning party, more reminiscence of UKIP light. With Trus seeming gleeful to be fully embracing it.
of course you didn’t like the cults of blair and corbyn, because you’re more centre right than blair was.