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.” She said: “There are some key differences between them, like Andy will be much more open and outspoke, and Keir is much more silent.

reasons not to back Lisa Nandy for Labour leader 3 big reasons not to back Lisa Nandy for Labour leader

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. A source inside Labour joked that such short stints in Westminster are often viewed as lazy. “What people say about Lisa is they’re not sure what she actually wants to do,” he added. “She is very brilliant but a bit of a loner. Very talented and driven by ideas, but is she going to play ball with Keir? She needs to demonstrate that she has relationships around the shadow cabinet table. Would I want to do karaoke with her? Absolutely. What would she be like if she was your boss? There is a question mark over her.” Nandy dedicates an early chapter to cover the global issues at play over recent decades that have marked an end to certainty, which she then links to the situation more locally in the UK. Big issues like the response to Covid-19, the Climate Crisis, Brexit and the technological challenges which affect our work are all explored as factors which have all challenged our way of life in recent years and on a daily basis. Lisa Nandy has served as Shadow Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities since 2021. 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.Lisa Nandy criticised this reality, saying: “I do not want to see power move from men in Whitehall to men in the town hall.” 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.” The book goes on to discuss how most major cities are now beset with high housing costs, air pollution and congestion so even the ‘winners’ are losing. 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

Lisa Nandy | Events | Manchester Literature Festival Lisa Nandy | Events | Manchester Literature Festival

Lisa is a serving Shadow Secretary of State, so I did not expect the book to announce new Labour policies - and it's always a risk that a position articulated in All In is mistaken for Labour policy, so I it should be expected that Lisa would err on the side of caution in their work. That may be why I think the solutions Lisa sets out fall short. They are all well-trodden paths: handing power to communities and so forth. That doesn't mean that Lisa is wrong, but I would have liked her to be bolder in her solutions - and I think looking further afield outside of the UK may have added value to this. Like the opposition, once in power, you can modify policy programmes and take people with you into the Labour future. Reportedly spoke at Blue Labour’s 2016 conference (though she has allegedly said its ideology isn’t the answer to Britain’s problems). Lisa Nandy is such an impressive, articulate and clear politician to listen to, but this book is weighed down with convoluted sentences, repetition and no clear progression or structure. She repeats so many times near the end of the book, that life is complex, politics is complex, and we need to accept that, yet we look to our politicians to wade through the complexity and come up with genius, simple solutions to dilemmas. 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.Beard’s life amounts to an unwritten Hemingway novel. He attended bull fights with Picasso and was a friend of both Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí; he was painted by Francis Bacon and was a neighbour of Karen Blixen; his innumerable lovers included Lee Radziwill and his later wife Cheryl Tiegs; and his equally innumerable scrapes included being whipped for mistreating a poacher and being gored by an elephant. It is all a gift to a biographer, and Beard’s long-time friend Graham Boynton, a journalist raised in Zimbabwe, does justice to his preposterously full life. 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.”