Liz Kendall is a real rising star in the Labour party. Few colleagues have a bad word to say about her, and indeed many have a great deal of good words. Tonight the House magazine publishes an interview with the Shadow Health Minister that contains a number of rather strong comments that she’s made about the party that she has a good chance of one day leading. The line that’ll get most attention is this:
‘You can’t be the moaning man in the pub. Actually the moaning man in the pub often has a real point underneath it all. But mostly you end up not listening.’
And then there’s the suggestion that her parents are unimpressed with Labour’s performance:
‘A lot of my election campaign is spent dealing with my parents sending texts with comments on everything from “it was a disgrace on PMQs today, what are you going to do about?” to “nobody’s talking about old people”, “what are Labour saying about schools and families and kids?”’
She gives one of the best answers to the leadership question that anyone who looks vaguely enthusiastic is asked:
‘If anyone says anything nice about me it’s incredibly flattering. All I care about is winning on 7 May. All I care about is getting Ed into Downing Street, full stop. That’s it.’
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Kendall is trying to sabotage her party or undermine her leader, but I have a hunch that this is a marker that she’s putting down in case a grumbly campaign from her party doesn’t yield the result it wants in May. This is advice, not outright criticism, but it’s also advice that does hit home on the problems that Labour does have: Kendall is not the only one who appears to be worried that her party is only offering a negative picture of how bad life is under the Tories rather than how good life could be under Labour. It’s something frontbenchers fret about privately the whole time. One of her more senior colleagues makes exactly the same point to me about a moaning message, saying:
‘People don’t want to be told that their lives are crap, they want us to give a sense that we will actually improve their lives.’
But it’s also striking how different Kendall’s language on the NHS is from her immediate boss, Andy Burnham. She doesn’t talk about the ‘privatisation of our NHS’ as Burnham and other colleagues do, but instead tells the magazine about the value of competition and the importance of personal budgets. Kendall was appointed after she had made these views quite clear in interviews and pamphlets, so it will come as no surprise to her colleagues. She has – up to this point – got away with being quite different to her colleagues because she is well-liked. It will be interesting to see how long her independent spirit is tolerated in a party that goes to quite some lengths to ensure loyalty and message discipline from its foot soldiers.
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