Clare Coghill: Why I’m backing Lisa Nandy to be the next Labour leader

We have the chance to make history. We can elect the first ever woman leader of the Labour Party in over a century since its creation. It is well overdue and, let’s face it, we cannot go on as we are. Every day there seem to be new examples of political failure by men at the top. Whether it’s the barefaced lies of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, or the ‘strongman’ authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, our leaders are letting us down. Lack of serious action on climate breakdown, the rise of nationalism, gaping inequality, and new security challenges are going unchecked because they are simply not up to the job.

For too long, we have accepted that our leaders must look and sound a certain way. Put on a suit, wear a tie, declaim from a lectern and you can be passed off as ‘presidential’. Roll up your shirt sleeves, don a high-vis jacket and you can be praised as an ‘oven-ready’ Prime Minister. We need to break this mould. Because if we don’t, we will not be in a position to rise to the challenges – and seize the opportunities – of the coming decades. It’s time to rethink what leadership looks like.

With Lisa Nandy, Labour can elect a new kind of leader with a new kind of leadership. We can be different as female leaders – not telling people to do, but standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them. We listen to voters rather than tell them what they should believe, recognising that people want power and control to change their own lives, not to have change imposed on them. People inside and outside of Labour are responding incredibly positively to Lisa, who is straight-talking and honest. She doesn’t fudge or prevaricate. We can all see she is strong and principled, and doesn’t sit on the fence.

In Lisa, we can elect a woman with a decade of political experience, a deep understanding of policy-making and strong community roots. By electing her, we are choosing someone who won’t offer false promises or easy answers to challenging questions. Someone who is comfortable with the world being complicated, messy and sometimes downright difficult. After four consecutive election defeats, we can elect a woman who gets it – who’s ready for the challenge ahead and can build common purpose between voters in all parts of our country.

When any woman seeks to lead, to put their head above the parapet, and say ‘I’m the right person for this job’, she stands on the shoulders of generations who have come before. And in the Labour Party we have some of the strongest and broadest shoulders around. We are the party of Barbara Castle, Mo Mowlam, Margaret Beckett, Diane Abbott, and the indomitable Harriet Harman. 51% of Labour MPs are women. A Labour government appointed the first ever female Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary. It’s shocking that, despite this, we still have never elected a woman to be leader. It’s time to smash this final glass ceiling and show our daughters, step-daughters and granddaughters that leaders look and sound like them.

This is not just the right thing to do and the way to inspire thousands of girls and young women to get involved in politics – it’s how we win. Lisa is the best candidate to bring our party together, put forward a positive and progressive policy agenda and take the fight to Johnson. We’ve seen again and again how this weak and waffling Prime Minister runs scared from situations that aren’t in his limited comfort zone. We saw in the election campaign how he swerved the scrutiny of Andrew Neil, how he refused to look at pictures of a little boy lying on a hospital floor, and how he hid in a fridge to avoid a journalist.

He feels at home bantering with the boys from the Bullingdon Club. But how will he cope when confronted, week after week, by a smart and principled northern woman, challenging him with the real life impact of his appalling politics? The short answer is, he won’t. How would he stand up to the forensic questions, plain-speaking and honesty of Lisa Nandy? That would be a battle worth watching, and one that I know would start to shift the polls in our favour.

When Channel 4 recently ran focus groups on the Labour leadership candidates, Lisa was the candidate most likely to win back the voters we’ve lost. The latest polling also showed she has the highest favourability rating of those standing. The task ahead is mammoth. We need to gain 124 seats to form a majority of just one. But it was Barbara Castle who once reminded us that, “in politics, guts is all”. So let’s make the gutsy choice. As the first woman to be elected as leader, Lisa Nandy can show how a different kind of leadership can deliver for our party and, more importantly, for the country too.