Liz Kendall is the great unknown Labour leadership candidate. She is the only one who hasn’t been in government or Shadow Cabinet, and as I blogged earlier, she needs to show that she has got qualities that make up for this lack of experience. She made a pretty good start on this at the press gallery lunch today, as the first candidate to speak to, and take questions from, journalists. Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham will presumably agree to the same event at some stage – and they now have a hard act to follow.
In her opening speech, Kendall painted a rather brutal picture of where her party had ended up and why it had lost. She said:
‘This defeat was epic. We lost by a magnitude few predicted or imagined. The election demands a new era for the Labour party. The question is whether we’ll grasp it. If we don’t face up to what needs to be done to win back Ukip, Tory and SNP voters in England, Scotland and Wales, we will not win again.
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