Who is Lisa Nandy? The Wigan MP who could be next Labour leader

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Tom Herbert3 April 2020
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Lisa Nandy is just one of three potential candidates to replace Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party.

The MP for Wigan threw her hat into the ring earlier this year and is fighting it out with Sir Keir Starmer and Rebecca Long-Bailey to be the next leader of the opposition.

Earlier this year, Mr Corbyn announced he would stand down as party chief after he oversaw Labour's worst election results since 1935, and the race to replace him opened at the end of February.

The polls closed on Thursday, April 2 and with the results to be announced on Saturday morning (April 4), we take a look at LIsa Nandy.

Northern powerhouse: Lisa Nandy at Westminster
Daniel Hambury/@stellapicsltd

Who is Lisa Nandy?

The veteran Labour politician has been representing Wigan since 2010. Before that, she was a Labour councillor for Hammersmith Broadway from 2006-2010 where she served as a shadow cabinet member for housing.

Born in Manchester in 1979, her grandfather was Liberal MP Frank Byers and her father is the Marxist and academic Dipak Nandy. Before entering Parliament, she also worked as a researcher and caseworker for Labour MP Neil Gerard.

With a reputation as a constituency campaigner, Ms Nandy set up the Centre for Towns thinktank last year and has called for the party's decision-making structures to move out of the capital in order to the party to regain the trust of voters outside London.

"Our Labour headquarters, in my view, should move out of London, our regional offices should be empowered to take real decisions, we should move our party conferences back to towns as well as cities," she said.

Ms Nandy said it is "undoubtedly true" that Mr Corbyn is to blame for the devastating defeat, but said it was not a rejection of the ideas in the Labour manifesto.

Considered to be a soft-left MP, Ms Nandy was one of a handful of shadow minister who resigned from Mr Corbyns's frontbench after the Brexit referendum and his leadership, and has in the past revealed the abuse she has received for not supporting the outgoing leader.

A former shadow energy secretary, Ms Nandy voted Remain in 2016 but has argued against a second referendum and revealed that she voted in favour of Boris Johnson's Brexit deal in October.

The 40-year-old mother-of-one was born in Manchester and educated at a comprehensive school in the city, before continuing her education at a sixth form college in Bury and later studying politics at Newcastle University.

Her partner, Andy Collis, is a public relations consultant, and she is determinedly focused on winning back many of Labour's traditional heartlands which it lost in the December 2019 general election.

She told the Telegraph: "I understand that we have one chance to win back the trust of people in Wigan, Workington and Wrexham.

"Without what were once our Labour heartlands we will never win power in Westminster and help to buld the country we know we can be."

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