Sir Keir Starmer has been in a TV studio in MediaCity , appearing on BBC Breakfast.

While Salford MP Rebecca Long-Bailey - his closest rival for the Labour leadership - is away in the Potteries launching her campaign, in a strange turn of events he is in her constituency on this cold Saturday morning in January, preparing to launch his own.

For the next few hours, he will be getting a tram with me through Manchester and up into Oldham for a walkabout, before returning to the city centre to address activists and councillors at the Mechanic’s Institute, a rock-solid symbol of Mancunian trade unionism.

Physically and - he is hoping - politically, he is slap bang in her backyard.

Starmer is unfailingly polite about Long-Bailey, the other candidates and Jeremy Corbyn. His speech later in the day will stress the importance of ending factionalism in the party, a feat not achieved in the 20th Century and nor, so far, in the 21st.

However a more subtle critique is still there. When I ask about the slightly wearying working class oneupmanship of this race - Starmer had in fact begun highlighting the credentials of his back story several months ago, flagging that his dad was a toolmaker and his mum a nurse - he insists he has only done so because people make ‘assumptions’ about where he came from, as a QC and former Director of Public Prosecutions.

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“If you take the position of my parents - as I’ve now said, my dad was a toolmaker, my mum was a nurse - they wouldn’t have talked about what they do,” he says, slowly, but then adds: “Actually working class people don’t go round talking about themselves in that way. So I’m actually pretty uncomfortable with it.

“I think now these things have been said they don’t need to be repeated over and over again and actually I think the public want to know what sort of person are you now, can we trust you with what needs to be done with the country?”

Did Corbynism - does Corbynism - recognise that working class people are aspirational?

“I think so,” he says equally carefully, before pausing. “But I don’t think it was a powerful enough message. And this goes back to my mum and dad and actually to many, many generations, I think.

“Because one thing that comforted my mum and dad through the ups and downs of life was the idea that the next generation would have better opportunities than them: and it absolutely drove them - almost ‘we’re not going to grumble about what’s happening and whether we’ve had the best life or not’, but the fact that the next generation’s life really really matters to us.

“Which is a very, very strong working class instinct.

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“And therefore the pride for my mum and dad when I first went to university was huge. And we should never forget that driving, I suppose, force for working class people.”

Is this something the class warfare rhetoric of the harder left misses, I wonder.

“I think sometimes it misses a broader piece,” he admits, before slipping seamlessly into a Corbynite-friendly message, albeit a point that on the strength of his professional track record, he also believes.

“I think it’s probably come about because of the polarisation and the extent of the inequality now, the extent to which the country has become more unequal is genuinely shocking and there are so many obvious examples of that.”

He reels off many permutations of such divides: homelessness, regional differences in life expectancy, inequality of influence and opportunity.

“And I think all of that, which has been particularly accentuated in the last ten years, but has been creeping up on us for a long time, I think has got us to that sort of language. But there’s a danger that you miss a bigger piece here about how people...we need to be radical and relevant,” he says, stressing the word ‘relevant’.

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“In other words what we need to be saying are things that resonate with people about the lives they’re living. Higher wages, better housing, these are simple things but they actually, of course, really matter to people.”

This is not the explicit, full-throated criticism of Tameside MP Angela Rayner in her deputy leadership launch last week, when she said Labour had ‘patronised’ working class voters, pointing out that many of those who were told to ‘f*** off and join the Tories’ then did exactly that.

But while Rayner is the runaway favourite for the deputy leadership, despite not being a die-hard Corbynite, there remain questions over how Starmer will go down on the left of the party. Having long been considered a potential Labour saviour among some, he is still regarded with suspicion by many leftwingers and despite having Unison support, Rebecca Long-Bailey is still favourite to gain the muscle of Unite and Momentum.

So he walks a tightrope, albeit with the skill, preparation and precision of a QC. In his speech at the Mechanics Institute later in the day, he urges the party to trash neither Tony Blair nor Jeremy Corbyn. He is also, I suspect, genuinely irritable about being put in a box.

When he says that he doesn’t have another Labour leader’s name ‘tattooed on my face’, as he has insisted repeatedly when asked who he most aligns with, that may well be true. He has probably been thinking about this leadership campaign for quite some time.

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So what does a radical Starmer policy look like? He doesn’t believe in the free market model or the trickle down model, he says.

“It is perfectly legitimate for a democratic government to say we will support good businesses and work with good businesses, but there are rules of the game.

“Just to give an example of the ones I think are most important: what has bedevilled productivity is short term investment. So one of the rules of the game - one of the things I would put in place as leader of the Labour Party - is a framework that incentivises long term investment and disincentivises short term investment.

“I think it’s legitimate for government to say the days in which something is good for the economy and bad for the environment are over.

"If it’s bad for the environment it’s bad for the economy and that needs action. We talked of action in relation to the public sector, where it’s reasonably easy to set targets. We need to be thinking how does that work in the private sector?

“There are returns that have to go to Companies House from the private sector in terms of financial issues. I’d be very interested in the idea of returns going in on environmental issues.”

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The green new deal, a policy drawn up by his rival Rebecca Long-Bailey, would be kept under his leadership, he says. It is the only part of the 2019 manifesto he actively highlights as something he supports, apart from public ownership of the railways.

The tram is now wending its way out of Victoria and out into north Manchester, beyond which lies Oldham. There has been much talk of areas like these - each different and complex, but all suffering the aftershock of successive recessions and manufacturing decline - since Brexit, only ramped up further in the wake of the election result.

What do these areas need? And is there a danger the north becomes fetishised along the way, without politicians really understanding the problems, never mind the solutions?

“I don’t think it’s town vs city,” he says, “but there’s obviously a very different distinction, that’s felt differently,” before stressing that he has spent the last three years visiting places outside of London while shadow Brexit secretary. He is being hosted here today by Oldham West and Royton MP Jim McMahon, former leader of Oldham council, whose seat epitomises the kind of place currently being pored over.

“One of the mistakes we make is to assume that all is gone and all is lost, whereas actually in Oldham, Jim will tell you - and he’s shown me before - as, actually in Leigh, there are businesses, there are innovations going on. It’s just they don’t really have enough support and nurturing. So I actually think that if we recognise and build the value of what is in the towns and build it up, that is better than this.”

And then, the implicit critique.

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“There’s lots and lots of commentators at the moment around towns. One of the things Jim has said to me which really resonated was they need champions, not commentators.

“They need people who are advocates for what’s actually going on in the town. So I think that’s a very important agenda. I don’t think it’s just a thing in the north, actually.”

We are nearing Hollinwood, our last stop. I ask about anti-semitism. Emily Thornberry had said at the hustings of backbench Labour MPs last week that both he and she had raised concerns about this in private. If you query whether that’s true, you get an absolute insistence that he did so on the record, on programmes such as the Andrew Marr Show and the Today programme, including a stress on the need for the international definition of anti-semitism and for automatic exclusion of anyone expressing anti-semitic views.

In the end, he says, he concludes that the leader should take responsibility for it. So: did Jeremy Corbyn fail to?

The answer, again, is oblique but chiseled.

“Well what I found, when I was Director of Public Prosecutions and running an organisation of 8,000 people making hundreds of thousands of decisions, you needed a clear line of sight on certain decisions,” he says.

“And if you made it clear that those decisions are coming to my desk on a regular basis and I will be looking at it, it makes a material difference to how quickly and how well issues are dealt with.

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“So I’d take personal responsibility for it. I’d also set a different test now for the Labour Party.

“The test is whether those that left because of anti-semitism feel comfortable returning to the Labour Party. I had got in mind the tests about how we change the rules, how quickly cases are dealt with etc etc. But the test will be whether those who left because of anti-semitism feel comfortable returning.”

This is a necessarily crafted game. If he is to win, Starmer has to unify a party that at a distance - and even more when you look at it close up - is horrifically fractured.

In the meantime he has used every tool in his extensive kit to ensure we get only a cautious glimpse of him. His answer to a straightforward question - what was missing from the 2019 manifesto - is a case in point.

“The manifesto I’m most concerned about is obviously the 2024 manifesto or whenever it next comes around,” he says, in a nod to the strapline of his campaign, ‘another future is possible’.

“I’m very concerned that that would retain the radicalism of the last four years. I don’t want to throw the baby away with the bathwater here and I think they’re really important.”

And then the careful critique kicks in: “The 2017 manifesto needs to be translated into something relevant to lives in the 2020s and 2030s, because I think profoundly believe that Labour wins when it is able to glimpse the future, show people what the future looks like and actually persuade people there’s a better future there.”

Yet he doesn't class himself as a Corbynista. So what does he disagree with the Labour leader on? The answer is as brutal and silky smooth as a QC’s closing argument.

“I think we weren’t clear enough about what the vision for the future was. We were describing the present.”

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