Can the next Labour leader act as a bridge between politics and people?

As it happens I seem to have acquired an irregular slot on Jonathan Lampon’s ‘Behind the Headlines’ slot on Radio Leicester to talk about UK politics. After a heads up from Jonathan’s team yesterday I found myself as one of an elite few watching the Labour leadership last night…

Here’s the resulting discussion from this morning:

There’s also some quick supplementary thoughts on this morning’s SluggerReport.. To which I’d add…

As John Curtice warned last night Scotland has all but disappeared from Labour’s public mind in a way that could make it permanent. He also produced a couple of charts based on shifts in voting intentions which show Labour gaining sentiment in almost every demographic except amongst those who most consistently vote:

One of the reasons this leadership contest is not setting any fires yet could be the hangover from a campaign in which three out of the four players might have reasonably expected to be holding down a ministerial brief. None of them, you get the impression wanted to be there.

The other is that they have barely begun to do what Martin Kettle argued they needed to do nearly a month ago, which is to figure out exactly what went wrong, and how they might go about fixing it.

Some of that, I have already argued, means repairing some of the bottom up damage in the wider Labour movement. They might do worse than learning from the successes of their old rivals on the right.

Oh, and not a word from Andy Burnham about organising in Northern Ireland…

Mick Fealty

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty