Lisa Nandy ‘seriously thinking about’ replacing Corbyn as race heats up

After Jeremy Corbyn announced he would be stepping down as Labour leader following the party’s worst electoral defeat since 1935, Lisa Nandy MP is the first to break cover and openly announce she will be running to replace him.

The MP for Wigan, told BBC presenter Andrew Marr that she is ‘seriously thinking’ about running for the leadership.

Pressed by Mr Marr on whether she would run, Ms Nandy said: ‘Well, the honest answer is that I’m seriously thinking about it.’

She added: ‘The reason that I’m thinking about is because we’ve just had the most shattering defeat where you really felt in towns like mine that the earth was quaking and we’ve watched the entire Labour base just crumble beneath our feet.’

Ms Nandy said she could bridge the divide between Labour’s traditional heartlands in the North, which were eaten into by the Tories, and its remaining strongholds in major metropolitan areas.

Conceding it was a ‘very hard road’ to regain the trust of Labour voters in towns across the North, she called for the party’s decision-making structures to move out of the capital.

She said:  ‘Our Labour headquarters, in my view, should move out of London, our regional offices should be empowered to take real decisions, we should move our party conferences back to towns as well as cities.’

Ms Nandy said it is ‘undoubtedly true’ that Mr Corbyn is to blame for the devastating defeat, but said it was not a rejection of the ideas in the Labour manifesto.

Instead, she said: ‘We’ve got to rediscover how we can earn people’s trust in order to make that radical change that the country needs.’

Her intervention comes after Labour MP Jess phillips wrote a column in The Observer newspaper which was being seen as a potential pitch for a leadership challenge, though she is yet to throw her hat into the ring.

The MP for Birmingham Yardley, a Leave-backing constituency, said Labour was facing an ‘existential problem’ that working-class voters do not believe the party is ‘better than the Tories’.

She wrote: ‘It’s time to try something different.

‘The truth is, there are corners of our party that have become too intolerant of challenge and debate.’

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell is reported to be keen on Rebecca Long-Bailey MP replacing Mr Corbyn as Labour Party leader.

The party leadership had been keen during the campaign for Ms Long-Bailey to take a prominent role, and Mr McDonell has made clear his preference for a woman to be the next leader of the party.

The MP for Salford and Eccles in Manchester is a loyal Corbyn supporter, and describes herself as a ‘proud socialist’.