by Kevin Meagher

As campaign launches go, it was inauspicious. Rebecca Long-Bailey’s piece in yesterday’s Guardian was her first public attempt to flesh out both an analysis of the party’s disastrous election defeat and to tentatively suggest why she is the person to repair the damage.

How did it go? As I say, inauspicious. There was some stuff about upending ‘the broken political system’ and uniting communities ‘in all their diversity’ through ‘progressive patriotism.’

But she is still ‘considering’ whether to stand for leader. (It might have been wiser, then, for those advising her to set some clearer expectations about her strategy and timeline?)

Hey-ho.

What was interesting, however, amid the bromides about having an ‘honest discussion about why we lost and how we can win,’ is what she didn’t say.

There wasn’t a single reference to Jeremy Corbyn in the piece, less still to him having ‘won the argument,’ if not the actual, you know, election.

There was no attempt to justify the party’s manifesto, widely seen, to misquote Mario Cuomo, as an attempt to ‘govern in poetry’ with a string of unaffordable and outdated commitments.

‘There are many lessons to learn from the defeat,’ she said, ‘but it’s clear we didn’t lose because of our commitments to scrap universal credit, invest in public services or abolish tuition fees.’ (Code for ‘our expensive programme of nationalisation was a disaster?’)

Creditably, there was nothing that sought to gloss over the failings of the election defeat.

What she did say is that Labour cannot ‘blame Brexit alone’ (code, presumably, for ‘yes, Jeremy was an issue on the doorstep’) and the party ‘must recognise that it’s no good having the right solutions if people don’t believe you can deliver them.’ (Translation: ‘No-one believed our grandiose policies could be paid for’).

(One interesting footnote is that she didn’t use the word ‘socialism’ once – a de rigour affectation in Labour politics since the 2010 defeat).

Winners invariably repudiate their predecessors in their bid for redefinition and that, in an understated and careful way, is what Long-Bailey seems to have been doing. The piece is a polite attempt to put clear red water between her and Corbyn (and McDonnell too, often touted as her main benefactor).

This is important because, to all intents, Long-Bailey is a clean skin. She’s only been an MP since 2015 and has little political form before that.

Feel free to pick over the particulars in the comments section, but I can’t see much in her parliamentary contributions or the Early Day Motions she has signed since becoming an MP to frighten the horses either.

While her speeches as shadow business secretary – all green new deal and infrastructure spending – are dialled-up versions of previous Labour policies and no more interventionist than Peter Mandelson’s ‘industrial activism’ (aka picking winners) of a decade ago.

She seems a perfectly pleasant, if not fully-fledged, mainstream Labour politician. For my money, she comes across well in broadcast interviews.

What she most certainly is not is Corbyn V 2.0.

Long-Bailey has simply been a good sport and played a constructive role on the frontbench these past few years, while disgruntled moderates huffed and puffed, to little effect, from the backbenches.

That she is seen by many – putative supporters and detractors alike – as the candidate of the left owes much to Corbyn and McDonnell having made precisely the same mistake as Blair and Brown in failing to plan their succession.

There is no obvious hand-on-the-shoulder follow-on candidate from the left in this race (so far at least) and the Labour leadership really is up for grabs. The Corbynistas are trying to make sense of where to go, with reports of an all-too-familiar leaching of support away from the hard left from its more ambitious denizens – who have already worked out that losing elections on a regular basis pretty much sucks.

Can Long-Bailey successfully refloat the party off the sand dunes of the hard left’s fantasy island? Perhaps she can. People change and people in politics often change a lot.

Her predecessor as MP for Salford, Hazel Blears, might have ended up as an impeccably Blairite minister, but she was a leading light in the ‘Save Clause Four’ campaign following Blair’s pledge in his 1994 conference speech to scrap it.

Rebecca Long-Bailey’s rise is down to adroit personal positioning and the stupidity of more experienced moderates in abandoning the high ground of the frontbench. She has played her cards well and left few hostages to fortune.

Of course, this will be a recommendation to some and a criticism for others.

That she can present such wildly different interpretations underscores the depth of the crisis of direction Labour now faces.

Kevin Meagher is associate editor of Uncut

Tags: general election 2019, Jeremy Corbyn, Kevin Meagher, Labour leadership election 2020, Rebecca Long-Bailey