Book review – All In: How We Build a Country That Works by Lisa Nandy MP

Why do MPs write books? Most books by MPs owe their existence to a combination of the following three: desire for advancement, desire for clout or boredom. Do you want to be leader or perhaps have your sights set on a particular office? Advancement: Write a book. Do you want to mark yourself out (or maintain your reputation) as a thoughtful or outspoken backbencher, an ideas person or a media personality? Clout: Write a book. Do your ambitions outstrip the demands of your current position, or do your interests not align with the work you’re doing? Boredom: Write a book.

These things overlap, of course, and other motivations come into the mix. Desire through biography to claim a particular tradition is a common one, as is the simple lure of money for those who can get it. Some people have a sincere interest in the policy area that they are writing about. Some people are just trying to stay relevant. When reading a book by a serving politician, it is always worth considering the reasons why they have chosen to write whatever it is they have written.

Why, then, has Lisa Nandy, the Shadow Levelling Up Secretary, written a book, which she has titled All In: How We Build a Country That Works? Given that she has already run to be leader, we can take a) advancement as read. Considering that All In was announced when Nandy was Shadow Foreign Secretary – not a natural role for Nandy and one many viewed as a wing-clipping exercise for Keir Starmer’s erstwhile leadership rival – we can also factor in b) clout and c) boredom, for a full house.

Whatever the motivations, however, it is clear that Nandy, a serving shadow cabinet member – and, as such, subject to cabinet collective responsibility and rigorous rules around what policies she can announce or endorse – cannot write as bold a book as she would like. These constraints are apparent in All In, where critiques are sharp (and apposite) but solutions vague. At one point, Nandy addresses the lack of concrete policy suggestions, saying: “If you’ve got this far and think that’s what I’m about to do, you have completely missed the point. The assumption that one person can hold all of the answers, for all people, everywhere, is arrogant. It is what got us into this mess. The answer lies in people and communities and they must write the story of our future.” Can you hear that? It’s the sound of LOTO’s policy sign-off team nodding approvingly.

All of this being said, the book on its own terms is by no means bad. If you paid attention to what Nandy said when she ran to be leader in 2020 (something that is conspicuously not discussed in All In), there will be few surprises. Nandy believes in a politics of the local, arguing throughout that people need to have a say over what happens in their communities. The book begins with a discussion of Wigan FC, how much it means to the town that Nandy has represented in parliament since 2010 and her part in efforts to save the club after it went into administration in 2020. She deftly uses this to draw out bigger themes about local identity, global capital and how the country should be run. “If people had their way,” Nandy says – if the system worked, if our democracy and institutions and regulations allowed the clear expression of public will – “they would protect things they value.” Things like football clubs, high streets and bus routes, not profits.

The book’s strongest chapter is that on patriotism and national identity, a difficult topic for Labour politicians and an area in which Nandy has always distinguished herself with an unusual fluency. Drawing on her upbringing as a mixed-race kid in 1980s Manchester, she talks, convincingly, about the need for “a country at ease with itself” and with its history.

The book is full of references to the work of writers, historians, politicians and the general intellectual great and good, but the insight these references provides rarely rises above the level of the quote, and the book seldom deploys the actual ideas of those discussed effectively in service of the argument. I think it’s good that Nandy knows who CLR James is, but the overall impact of all this name-dropping is quite shallow, and at points only serves to highlight how superficially certain topics are discussed. This quotation-heavy style also often makes the book feel a bit repetitive. In parts, this is because it is; Nandy uses the same quote from Abraham Lincoln twice (“The dogmas of the past are inadequate to the stormy present.” Nandy really loves this quote; she used it in her 2019 Attlee lecture as well) and, bizarrely, the same quote from the intellectually aspirant Conservative MP Jesse Norman twice.

Nandy has a more distinctive political pitch than most big-name Labour politicians. All In is a good summary of that pitch, and Nandy a likeable narrator. For anyone who has paid any serious attention to Nandy’s career, however, there is little new here and a faint sense of frustration that the work she is presenting has the impression of having been written in pencil, rather than the clearer lines of which she is obviously capable.