Labour’s leadership race heats up – but is it all too late?

Lisa Nandy didn’t hold back last night. First, in the sense that she became the second Labour leadership candidate to voluntarily publish a donor list earlier than required. The move comes after Rebecca Long-Bailey released her own list of campaign funding sources, and Unite’s Len McCluskey called on her rivals to follow suit. One of them has now done so.

The latest disclosure shows that Nandy has so far received around £190,000 in terms of donations over £1,500 – around half of the amount declared by Long-Bailey. You can have a close look at Nandy’s list here. Young Labour has now written a letter to help pressure Keir Starmer to publish early, but it seems likely that the frontrunner will wait until the parliamentary website updates his register of interests page, which he said would “probably be on Monday”.

Second, Nandy caused the first big disagreement in a Labour leadership debate during the hustings hosted by Sky News. She has been a little combative before, when she strongly criticised the open selections policy advocated by Long-Bailey. The rebuke we saw last night was more forceful, and directed mostly towards Starmer.

Talking about Labour’s handling of antisemitism, she implied that the frontrunner had failed to acknowledge “how badly the shadow cabinet as a whole got this wrong”. Then she went further, claiming that shadow cabinet members did not take up the offer of seeing Labour’s submission to the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Starmer replied that this was “absolute nonsense”. You can read the full exchange here.

While Nandy has used one of the last debates to launch an offensive on Starmer, and we will be keeping a keen eye on whether she does the same at the next hustings on Saturday, Long-Bailey is aiming to beef up her core vote. Corbynites have been saying in recent weeks that it’s time to be bold – with Long-Bailey trailing behind in second place according to polling and nominations, Jeremy Corbyn must make an intervention.

This intervention has now been made this morning in the form of a video. It is a sort of interview, which sees the outgoing leader and the Labour left candidate discuss plans for a green industrial revolution. They are sitting in a room that has had all the heating turned off – tying in with the conversation topic, but also a bit of an inside joke because Corbyn is known to hate heating, which I’ve heard before as people have complained of “freezing” in shadow cabinet meetings.

Can Long-Bailey and Nandy turn this contest around? If a majority of those eligible to vote in this leadership election have already cast their ballots, it is thought very unlikely. New polling will hopefully give us further insight into what Labour members are thinking – watch out for that news on LabourList.