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We meet Rebecca Long-Bailey in her office next to the shadow cabinet room in Parliament — she apologises that it’s a “bit of a tip”. It’s no wonder — she and the other Labour leadership candidates have been on a long, punishing campaign trail. She admits it’s been gruelling and she’s looking forward to a night at home “in her pyjamas”.

We also notice a whiteboard with lots of complex algebra scribbled across it. “Beyond telling you it’s about GDP, that’s all I know,” she jokes. Long-Bailey is warm, personable and down-to-earth. She tells of life in Westminster’s most famous flat share — she lives with her good friend Angela Rayner, who is running to be Labour’s deputy leader.

“She looks after me. She went out to the shop the other day and got some Pot Noodles and put out a little bowl of sweets and biscuits that I was quite pleased about.” And what about Rayner’s famous penchant for shoes? “When we first moved in, she literally had a bookshelf and she put all of her shoes on it. Some of them were quite wacky and I remember my mum coming round and she asked me, ‘Are they ornaments?’ I said, ‘No, they’re Angela’s shoes, mum.’”

Long-Bailey enjoyed a misspent youth in the early Noughties in Manchester, where she went clubbing four nights a week, had rainbow-dyed hair and a lower lip piercing, wore baggy trousers with a vest and was a “bit of a skater girl”, although she says: “I could only go in a straight line. [The board] was more of a prop to make me look cool.” She’s thankful her mum threw away the photos. These days, she’s no rebel. Long-Bailey went on to become a solicitor in Salford, joined the Labour Party in 2010, was elected as an MP for Salford and Eccles in 2015, and swiftly became a rising star — and shadow business secretary. She is seen as the protégé of shadow chancellor John McDonnell — who has long touted her as a future leader and affectionately calls her “Becky”. She has also been dubbed the “Continuity Corbyn” candidate after giving him 10 out of 10 in an interview, but she doesn’t like the label. “It’s just really irritating. After the advances that we’ve made in terms of women’s equality, we’ve not come far enough to allow women to stand in their own right without being attached to a man. I’m very much my own person.”

While she won’t be drawn on whether Corbyn and McDonnell would make it into her shadow cabinet, she says: “I’m friends with both of them. I’ll be in touch with them for many years to come.” She is also clear that she will not personally criticise them for Labour’s election defeat in December, and blames Brexit and how the party communicated its policies.

“Throughout our election campaign there were an awful lot of policies being announced on a daily basis. Even as a member of the shadow cabinet, I found it quite difficult to keep track of what we were actually announcing and when.”

She says the manifesto’s policies were the “right answers to many of the issues that we currently face” but concedes “there were some policies which weren’t really deliverable in five years. I wouldn’t have had the four-day working week in the manifesto.”

She also criticised the timing of the Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) funding policy. WASPI is a voluntary UK-based organisation that campaigns against the way in which the state pension age for men and women was equalised. It calls for the millions of women affected by the change to receive compensation. “We had spent five years building up that economic credibility, costing everything to within an inch of its life. And adding that as an extra policy after the grey book went out was an ideal opportunity for the Conservatives to attack us.”

She also feels aspiration was missing from Labour’s offer. She uses the word frequently, a term often associated with Tory-voting Essex Man in the Eighties. What does aspiration mean to her? “Everybody wants to do well, they want to have a job that pays enough to have a decent home, a nice car, be able to go on holiday, they want to achieve their dreams, and they want to make sure that their children will always have a better life than them,” she says. “We need to tap into that.”

Would she, like Peter Mandelson, be intensely relaxed about the “filthy rich”?

“I want everyone to pay their taxes and contribute to our economy,” she says, appearing to conflate wealth with tax-dodging. She also talks of “aspiration in a community sense”, meaning better public services.

Polls put Long-Bailey trailing behind Sir Keir Starmer. A recent YouGov survey put Starmer on 53 per cent to Long-Bailey’s 31 per cent. Still, she has been endorsed by the leadership and powerful organisations including Unite and Momentum, who propelled Corbyn to the top job twice. Why isn’t she doing better in this race?

“We don’t know who’s going to win,” she pushes back. She points out the leadership contest has been a bit tame so far. “We all get on very well with each other. But we’ve never really got into any detailed discussions about policies and what each of the candidates actually believe in.” She says it’s not about the “gloves coming off” but getting down to the “nitty-gritty of what we believe in”.

She stresses she won’t attack the other candidates. “It’s wrong to be nasty about people who are within your own party. If you want to have a go with them do it in private, but don’t do it in public.” But she has a dig at frontrunner Keir Starmer for not publishing all his donors, although he says what he has revealed is within the rules.

“People want to see who donates to your campaign because it often gives an indication of what your politics are and who’s going to be influencing you in the future. Those donors always expect to be paid back in the end.”

She adds: “I’m proud that my donations have come from trade unions, Labour Party members, Momentum members who I know have supported me because we share the same political ideals.” She also teases Starmer about the large posters of him that have been mailed out to supporters. “It is a bit cheesy, isn’t it? It’s just weird because I know Keir. It’s kind of like somebody putting a picture of your brother on the wall.” She isn’t planning one for herself.

Who will replace Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader? 3 show all Who will replace Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader? 1/3 Rebecca Long-Bailey Getty Images 2/3 Lisa Nandy REUTERS 3/3 Keir Starmer PA 1/3 Rebecca Long-Bailey Getty Images 2/3 Lisa Nandy REUTERS 3/3 Keir Starmer PA

On Labour’s Brexit policy shambles, she “wouldn’t pin the blame on any particular individual” but says there was “definitely a tendency to not really understand what was happening in many of our communities and understanding the strength of feeling”.

Did Starmer go up north enough to get it? “I think to truly understand them, you probably have to live in them and speak to people on a daily basis and understand the strength of feeling. A couple of door- knocking sessions isn’t really going to show you.” For someone who says she doesn’t go bareknuckle, Long-Bailey can pack a punch.

She has faced criticism for not being vocal enough on the party’s anti-Semitism scandal. Does she lack courage on the issue? “Not at all. It is upsetting to think that people don’t think that I would tackle anti-Semitism because I’ve often been the shadow cabinet member brave enough to go out to the media and talk about the deficiencies in the way that we’ve dealt with the crisis.” She recently faced criticism for not calling out a man for making anti-Semitism remarks at a fundraiser. “I do regret, in retrospect, not directly making a point of saying something about that.” She maintains, though, that she did raise the issue with shadow cabinet and spoke to senior figures in the party. She also says the treatment that Jewish female MPs such as Luciana Berger, Louise Ellman and Ruth Smeeth faced was “terrible because it should never have happened within our party. We should have done more”. Did she ever reach out to them? “I didn’t speak to Louise or Luciana or Ruth directly. I wish I had. I should have done at the time and that’s another one of my big regrets.”

She wants there to be an independent complaints system and that all MPs and members should get education, so that none of this happens again.

Another ongoing row within the party is over transgender rights. She says “I’m very much in favour of self ID for trans people, because the process that many have to go through to identify as a trans man or a trans woman is dehumanising, it’s long, it’s degrading.” She also says “there should never be a contradiction between standing up for trans rights and the rights and safety of women”. What does she make of the increasingly toxic tone of the debate, no platforming and calling women “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (terfs)? “Terf” is used to describe feminists who express ideas that other feminists consider transphobic, such as the claim that trans women are not women, opposition to transgender rights and exclusion of trans women from women’s spaces and organisations. “I don’t like it. The whole terf business within the party hasn’t been very nice at all. It’s led to many people within the party feeling very alienated, both those who are fighting for the rights and the respect of trans people and those fighting for the protection of women and the safety of women. We need to change that culture within the party.”

While she is very much wedded to the ideology of Corbynism, she appears to have a more forgiving disposition when it comes to people who have disagreed with the leadership. She would welcome back Luciana Berger even though she stood for a rival party at the last election. “The circumstances for what happened to Luciana were very different from an MP who was just angry with the leadership. She had a terrible time.” And she would also like to see Alastair Campbell return. “He’s got a lot of expertise and capability that I wish had been there to help us prior to December.” She jokes that he could maybe head up the rebuttal unit she wants to set up to attack anti-Labour media smears.

“We’re a broad church. We can’t have a fight to the death for whichever particular faction wants to be in control of the party. Having differences of opinion on policy … and pushing different policy positions is a positive thing. And it actually makes us the most electable force in British politics. Unless we bring that diversity together, we’re never going to win a general election.”

She also says she wouldn’t get rid of the monarchy when the Queen dies. “We’ve got more important things to worry about. Anyway, I met Charles inadvertently when I was eight or nine when I gave flowers to Princess Diana. She was lovely. She didn’t speak to me for very long, but she said, ‘Now that we’ve met we will be friends forever.’”

Long-Bailey is bright, diligent and economically Left-wing but is showing a softer, more pragmatic streak and wants Labour to win. Not so much Continuity Corbyn — perhaps More of McDonnell? ​