Gloria De Piero interview: Labour let children like me down in the 1980s. It can’t do that again.

Gloria De Piero is one of Labour’s most confident performers: a former television presenter who is well-liked in her party for speaking ‘normal’, she rarely seems ruffled. But when we meet in her Westminster office, the MP for Ashfield seems oddly anxious. Her party has been behaving in a similarly unsettled way ever since it started facing up to the fact that it was about to elect a backbencher as its leader, so perhaps it’s not all that surprising. But De Piero has agreed to serve in Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet in the rather nebulous-sounding ‘Young People and Voter Registration’ brief, so she can’t be as unsettled by his victory as some of her moderate colleagues, who have fled to the backbenches. So what’s up?

‘I feel guilty,’ she says, taking a draw on an e-cigarette. Why? ‘Because I just think the Labour party, if it’s not in government it’s not changing people’s lives, and if I can make that more personal, actually, because this is not the first time we’ve not been in government, but growing up I actually feel the Labour party let me down in the 80s as well.