During this criticism, she remained complimentary of Burnham’s decision to introduce the Bee Network to Wigan, Bolton and Bury first. 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.” 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".

Lisa Nandy to An Yu: recent books reviewed in short From Lisa Nandy to An Yu: recent books reviewed in short

Barbara, a local matriarch and Sunshine worker, was complaining about a hotel up the road in Standish that in 2021 received 200 refugees overnight. There were Britain First protests outside it, said Nandy. Wigan was 95 per cent white at the last census in 2011; there are now two mosques in the borough. Under the Home Office’s dispersal scheme, which subcontracts accommodation arrangements to Serco, more migrants are arriving in Wigan, but the local council is often kept out of the loop. The Standish refugees were rehoused in local flats where, according to Barbara, they made a lot of noise. Whenever the conversation veered towards complaint, Nandy broadened it with a joke or an inclusive gesture; she pointed out that one of the refugees now volunteers at Sunshine House. The case was another illustration of how the north could run itself better, she said, if only it were allowed to. After the fall of Kabul, the rehousing of Afghan refugees went much more smoothly when the Greater Manchester Combined Authority stepped in – working across its ten councils to sort housing, healthcare, schooling and employment support. Orange mushrooms appear and multiply as “ghosts” to taunt her at moments of emotional epiphany, from the horror she feels when she forgets how to play long-practised piano pieces to the pain she experiences on discovering her husband’s darkest secrets. Yu uses magic realism to infuse mystical elements into an otherwise ordinary Beijing city setting, and her symbolism is perplexing in places. Despite this, Ghost Music has beautiful prose and claustrophobic imagery that intensely evokes its protagonist’s alienation.I asked Nandy how she felt about the rehabilitation of New Labour; Angela Rayner and Keir Starmer are both unembarrassed to praise Tony Blair. “I’ve always hated cults,” she said, “so I disliked the cult around Blair just as much as I disliked the cult around Corbyn. I think it’s unhelpful for us as a party. One man doesn’t change things: movements do. So I feel very uncomfortable with the resurrection of the cults. I also think that those debates are very little to do with Blair the person and Corbyn the person – they’re much more about the Seventies fighting the Nineties, to see which vision of the past will win the day.” In the 2016 Panorama on Labour Party divisions, Nandy (apparently without a hint of irony) said the infighting “means that we’re distracted from the real task, which is to unite” to oppose the Tories. Nandy believes that Burnham’s position as mayor explains why this is the case, as he is able to talk more directly to the people who he represents. Nandy begins at Wigan Athletic’s DW football stadium, remembering the first match she attended as the town’s MP. Ten years later, she found herself part of a battle to save the club, after a new owner based in Hong Kong put it into administration at the first opportunity. Recalling the fire sale of assets that took place before weeping, baffled employees, she writes: “Fans and a community that should have been at the heart of the process were shut out, treated as a nuisance by wealthy and powerful people with no connection to the club… the wrong people held all the power.”

Lisa Nandy books and biography | Waterstones Lisa Nandy books and biography | Waterstones

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. 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. Greater representation of female politicians in the UK is a must, as without it Nandy believes people will not feel heard. 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. 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.

Their relationship cooled through the Corbyn years – “We were on different sides of the question about the leadership, and Brexit” – before warming during the leadership contest. Nandy revealed a slight superiority about Starmer’s late arrival to politics: “Many of us grew up in the Labour tradition – I was delivering party leaflets when I was seven. He’s not steeped in career politics. He’s come in a lot more recently, and he’s very challenging of why people hold the views they do. I think that has helped us – it’s one thing to feel the public mood, but another to turn that into a strategy. When we are together as a team, you can see how the strength of the people he has put around him makes him much more concrete.” They should be given greater control over it, rather than having Whitehall approve all of its decisions.” 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. After last night's comments we've asked her for clarification. @UKLabour members need to know if she's still committed to those pledges https://t.co/CrhvtKG0Vg She was resistant to talking about the influence of her father on her political career. Though she credits him with developing her sense of injustice, she insisted her mother had played a bigger part. The daughter of the Liberal MP Frank Byers, who later became a life peer, Luise Byers was a social worker who retrained and ended up in the current affairs department of Granada Television, working on shows such as World In Action.