It is less than a week since Lisa Nandy was reshuffled but she is already crystal clear about the importance of her new job. “It is the battleground on which the next general election will be fought,” she says. “It is also the battle for the future of the country.” Last Monday, Nandy, the MP for Wigan, who had started the day as shadow foreign secretary, took a call from Keir Starmer. “He rang and said, ‘You have been doing a fantastic job but we need you out facing the country, telling the story of the country that we can be’,” she tells the Observer. “His pitch was that we have to hold the Tories to account for their slogans and broken promises but we also have to show we have a story for every part of this country that matches the ambition of the people in it. It was a pretty irresistible offer.” Next day she took a call from the man she will shadow, Michael Gove, secretary of state for the sprawling Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. It was a courtesy call before the two square up. Nandy appreciated the gesture but says it was unnecessary. She is super confident on the levelling-up brief, not only because of her northern roots but because she has been campaigning for years for a better deal for everyone in towns and areas such as Wigan, where traditional industries have disappeared and never been replaced.
“The first thing I said to him is, ‘I want you to succeed, because I have skin in the game’. I said to him, ‘When you get it right you will have my full support but when you get it wrong there will be hell to play’.” And how did Gove react? “He said, ‘I know’ … but I think it is polite to tell people before you come for them on a national stage!” Nandy’s appointment, like several in Starmer’s reshuffle, has been well received in the party. The Tories are said to be more worried about the threat from the opposition benches. With the Tories and their leader seeming more vulnerable, it feels like Labour’s big chess pieces are in the right places on the board. Many of those shuffled upwards happen to be women, both experienced and up-and-coming: Yvette Cooper is now shadowing Priti Patel at the Home Office; Lucy Powell is taking on Nadine Dorries at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport; and Bridget Phillipson will oppose Nadhim Zahawi at Education. Starmer has said since the reshuffle that Labour is now the party of Middle England after its move to the left under Jeremy Corbyn. Nandy, on the other hand, is thinking more about points of the compass. When she was asked on Sky News if Starmer had moved his team to the right, she took issue with the question. “I said you can keep all that right and left line … This is the Labour party moving north. We are getting it out of Westminster.”
Gove’s department also deals with planning, housing, the future of the union, local government finance, fire safety and a lot else. A levelling-up white paper is expected early next year, so that is Nandy’s immediate focus. It was supposed to be out this month but, in a sign of the lack of detail behind the slogan, ministers have yet to agree what it should say. She bristles when asked about new structures and bodies she would put in place to deliver more power and resources to local areas. While she agrees with devolution and shifting more money to poorer areas, she feels the question is typical of one-size-fits-all Westminster attitudes. “This is always where Whitehall and Westminster start,” she says. “Do you need more metro mayors, do you need levelling-up boards in every community, do you need to change the funding structures? Actually, what you need is a different mindset, and that mindset is about the potential and ambition there is everywhere. That can only be unleashed if you go to these places and ask people what is there and what can be done to solve the problems. The answer is not the same for Dagenham as for Barnsley.” She insists she is not being evasive (she could be forgiven after less than a week in post) but says Westminster politicians and Whitehall always start at the wrong place when addressing issues they don’t feel in their bones. The challenge on levelling up is not, she says, about structures first and foremost. It is about being sensitive to how people feel in left-behind communities, their struggles and what they have lost, which in many cases is almost everything except their pride and their ambition. “There is growing anger”, she adds “about a settlement that has seen good jobs leaving many towns and villages. And with those jobs have gone opportunities for young people to stay and contribute to communities. It has also meant losing the spending power and the working-age populations that sustained our high streets, pubs, banks and post offices – and the bus networks that are commissioned on the basis of passenger numbers. It has left populations growing older in many of these places, often hundreds of miles from children and grandchildren, and they are, rightly, very angry.” She says people felt “disrespect” when politicians at Westminster (Starmer was one of them but she makes no mention of that) talked of a second Brexit referendum. This is what Nandy wants to address: the lack of understanding both of what has been lost but also of what remains. She thinks Westminster needs to feel it and get it before it can do anything about it. “The anger stems from a place of hope,” she says. “People are optimistic and ambitious for their own lives, families, communities but they want government to show the same ambition for them. Whitehall and Westminster tend not to see potential; they only see problems. Grimsby, Aberdeen, Wigan – they want a better future for their town.”