Lisa Nandy thinks she can win back the north. She may be right. The 40-year-old was one of the few northern MPs to retain her seat as Labour’s once-solid Red Wall crumbled in the 2019 general election. Around Nandy, the seats fell. Six miles to the east, Leigh – a Labour stronghold for nearly 100 years – swung Conservative. Sixteen miles south, Warrington South did the same. Bolton North East, Bury South, Bury North, Heywood & Middleton, Hyndburn – all turned blue.

Can Nandy convince Labour party members to give her a crack at the top job? Probably not. At the time of writing, frontrunner Keir Starmer is set for a decisive victory in the leadership contest, predicted to win in the first round of voting with 53 percent of the vote . Starmer is positioning himself as the unity candidate, the person capable of uniting the left and right wings of the party, whilst Momentum-backed Rebecca Long-Bailey is the person to keep Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist dream alive.

“I’ve spent 10 years trying to deal with the disconnect between national Labour, and towns like mine,” says Nandy, who grew up in nearby Manchester and Bury. “Seeing if it was possible to build a bridge from one part of our electoral coalition: younger graduate voters, largely based in cities, to older voters in ex-industrial towns around the country. I’m absolutely convinced that it is possible and despite the challenge we can win a general election again.”

It’s a lonely thing now, being a Labour MP in the north. Winning back the Red Wall will be critical if Labour – a party which has been out of power for a decade – wants to avoid extinction at the next general election. Lisa Nandy knows the stakes for the next Labour leader are high. She thinks she’s the woman for the job.

But Lisa Nandy held Wigan, which voted to leave the European Union , albeit with a hugely reduced majority. The seat, which comfortably piled up 20,000-plus Labour majorities in the 90s, was kept by just 6,728 votes. “We were really up against it,” sighs Nandy as she greets me in a nondescript conference room at Wigan Town Hall. “It was literally the worst election I’ve ever been involved in.” She even recruited priests to the fight. “We had local vicars doing sermons saying, ‘God says vote for Lisa Nandy!”

It’s not always clear exactly what Nandy would change. For all her talk of cleansing fire, her vision for the party – greater investment in the regions (Nandy famously loves towns, so much so there are memes about it), moving power from Westminster and a shift to the centre-ground – isn’t that dissimilar to Starmer’s.

Nandy would have you believe that she’s the candidate of radical transformation – the person most willing to admit where Labour went wrong and drag it back to the centre-ground. (She is the most right-wing of the remaining candidates, reluctantly identifying herself as “soft left.”) "Change or die,” Nandy says cheerily, as an aide hands her a mug of tea.

Optics aside, probably the biggest point of differentiation from her challengers – and the one least likely to win her fans in Momentum quarters – is Nandy’s stance on immigration. After saying that she “ would have the courage to listen ” to voters’ concerns on immigration, Nandy was the subject of a critical Guardian op-ed , and was accused of pandering to xenophobia on immigration.

There is of course, the fact that Nandy is a biracial northern woman (she is half-Indian), rather than the white, southern, middle-aged male politician from central casting that Starmer represents. “There has never been a leader of the Labour party that looks or sounds like me,” Nandy points out. “And there’s certainly never been a Prime Minister that looks and sounds like me before.”

Nandy believes this characterisation was unfair, and suggests that it might have been caused by hostile briefings from rival leadership teams. “I had a bit of this at the beginning of the campaign, where there was some briefing going around saying that I was pro-Blue Labour and anti-immigrant,” she says. She points out that she herself is from an immigrant background: her father, Marxist professor Dipak Nandy, moved to the UK from Calcutta in the 1950s.

Her stance on immigration has been shaped by her constituents. “When I hear people in towns like Wigan telling me that immigration is a problem, the obvious answer is, why would you think that, when we have very low levels of immigration here?” Nandy says. “It’s usually to do with economic factors, because the jobs just aren’t here that provide opportunities for young people.” Nandy backs freedom of movement, but insists that it needs to go alongside investment in skills.

She uses the example of nurses coming to Wigan from EU member states to work in the local hospital, while the nursing bursary had been cut. “People couldn’t understand how we’d allowed a settlement to grow up where people [from abroad] could come here to work in the local hospital, but their kids had just seen the nursing bursary abolished.”