monkey wrote:

From the clips I’ve seen of her media spree she just looks completely out of her depth in this context. She needed to make a step up from her usual speaking her mind cobblers if she wants to convince people she can lead the whole country. Floundering around on simple questions.

The problem is that the argument that she can cure it is, at the moment, based solely on her back-story. It’s based on the case that she is a change candidate, from “not London” and "gets it". The problem is that if your appeal is based on the spin of  "Lisa Nandy gets towns, folksily launches in the Wigan Post" and the reality is "Lisa Nandy: launches with an op-ed in the Guardian, just like everybody else", then your campaign becomes one without a unique selling point. As I wrote about the launch of Jess Phillips’ campaign a few hours earlier, if you run as straight-talking, you've got to talk straight. If you run as wanting to do politics differently, you have to do it differently. 
The awkward truth is that Nandy isn’t that different from the other candidates, or from any other Labour MP. She went to London for a bit, worked for an MP, then in a third sector organisation for a bit, then came home and became the MP. There’s nothing wrong with any of that. But when your campaign is based on doing things differently from the rest of the field, when they all have the exact same CV as you, it risks blowing the whole enterprise up. To offer change, you have to demonstrate change.