One moment from the first TV debate of Labour’s leadership race said it all

Who saw “that calamitous election defeat” coming? The opening scene of the first televised debate during Labour’s leadership election actually said it all. Asked to put their hands up if they foresaw Labour’s crushing 2019 loss, Lisa Nandy and Emily Thornberry did so while Keir Starmer and Rebecca Long-Bailey didn’t. This set the tone for the whole discussion.

Nandy wants to make the point that she is best-placed to win back now-‘Blue Wall’ seats, particularly as she has seen Labour’s failure to connect with voters in towns for so long. She put her hand up. Thornberry wanted to reiterate that she didn’t think Labour should have agreed to an election – a remark she repeatedly makes because the idea is that it shows off her political nous and experience. Her hand shot up too.

Starmer is trying to pitch left in his campaign for the leadership. As the frontrunner, he is successfully building a coalition of selectorate voters that has produced apparent oddities in the local party nominations whereby he can be nominated alongside Richard Burgon for deputy, or with Angela Rayner – supposedly Long-Bailey’s running mate – and left slate candidates for Labour’s national executive committee. Saying he didn’t anticipate the scale of the defeat plays into this pitch.

Long-Bailey simply cannot say anything different – and she has already admitted to not having realised that Labour would do so badly. In fact, she has cited it as a reason for not having a ready-made leadership campaign ready to go after the election. Although this is communicated as a reason for trusting that she is a hard worker who strongly believed in the viability of Corbynism, it provokes criticism of her political judgment. What’s more, her base was enthused by a commitment to open selections – but confirming tonight that she wouldn’t stick with a four-day week or abolishing private schools will have the opposite effect.

This one key moment of hand-raising, which crystallised their positions in the race, summed up the debate. While Long-Bailey is stuck playing to type, Starmer is counter-intuitively appealing to the Labour left and gaining votes across a broad coalition as a result. Thornberry, though she is close to securing a place on the ballot after the latest nominations, did not make enough of an impact to really improve her chances of a good showing in the ultimate vote. Nandy is strengthening her position as ‘the one most feared by Tories’, and is very unlikely to win the top job itself but should be guaranteed one of the biggest shadow cabinet roles.