Labour leadership: How much would Rebecca Long-Bailey change?
- Published
In full: Rebecca Long-Bailey interview
It's not right to suggest that nothing would change in the Labour Party under Rebecca Long-Bailey.
And it's not fair to suggest that all the shadow business secretary would be is Jeremy Corbyn dressed up in a different package, with a different accent.
If she won the contest to succeed Mr Corbyn, she would, for one thing, change the team at Labour Party HQ. If you have been following Labour's travails you will know that that is a sore and controversial point and it matters.
Mrs Long-Bailey wants to change how Labour talks to the country, telling us today that she wanted less emphasis on slamming the Tories, more focus on persuading the public that the party's plans would make their lives better, repeatedly talking about "aspiration".
That's just a word, sure. But if she were to win, it is a shift in language and political focus from Jeremy Corbyn's Labour in the last few years.
Make no mistake, Rebecca Long-Bailey was not just another member of the shadow cabinet. She was resolutely loyal, and even held the pen on much of the party's manifesto.
To hear her, therefore, stepping towards a different kind of story she would tell the electorate counts too. She is not, as she has been lampooned, just "continuity Corbyn".
She is, however, the closest of the four leadership rivals to the current leader. She has the backing of the campaign group Momentum, which has been Mr Corbyn's ballast during the last few years.
And unless something weird happens, she is likely to have the campaigning muscle of Mr Corbyn's most powerful backer, the Unite union, and its boss Len McCluskey who has, on occasion, acted as the Labour leadership's bouncer at times of turmoil.
As Momentum's favoured candidate, she will have access to enormous amounts of data, enabling her to contact thousands of voters in this election long before the other candidates, much to their frustration.
She is the preferred candidate of the machine that has got a grip on the party at the moment, no question. But that machine has just misfired, and misfired badly.
The shadow business secretary will have the Momentum campaign machine behind her
And what was striking, talking to her at length today, is the extent to which she stuck like glue to the offer the party actually made to the country at the election, which bombed.
Of course, she was never going to call for the whole lot to be junked, when she had spent months developing the policies and then arguing for them on the doorstep.
But there was a touch of the surreal when she said that the party had the right answers for the country - had offered a "great set of policies" - when the country's overall verdict was to send Labour packing, suggesting the very opposite.
There were other issues of course - the party's Brexit position, Mr Corbyn's leadership, the lack of action over anti-Semitism.
But there is a risk for the Labour Party that in this race a consensus takes hold, that the public actually really liked the manifesto the party put forward, and if there hadn't been those other pesky problems, they would have been home and dry.
Making that argument might have been possible if the party had only missed out by a few votes on 12 December. But is it an adequate response to a defeat of such magnitude?
Of course, many voters did like the manifesto - and polling suggests that some of the policies on their own went down well.
But there are plenty of Labour MPs who will say privately that the manifesto was a disaster, and plenty of people who normally vote Labour who told us the same thing, on the campaign trail.
Yet there is not much sign in this race so far that the contenders for Labour's crown are, at least in public, prepared really to confront the overall level of rejection. With Jess Phillips, who was much more outspoken, pulling out, that is now even more the case.
Rebecca Long-Bailey spoke today about a couple she had met in her own constituency of Salford and Eccles, who had worked hard and bought their own home, and did not believe Labour was the party for them.
She had tried to persuade them, as they chatted on the driveway, that "we want people to do well". But she had failed to change their minds.
The risk for her, and Labour at large, is without a bigger change of tack, they won't persuade the country either.
With much of the left's backing, Rebecca Long-Bailey is certainly a serious contender in the Labour leadership race. But her candidacy is, in a sense, a test of how much Labour really wants to change.
The BBC is hoping to interview all four remaining contenders. Here is my chat with Sir Keir Starmer from last week.
In full: Sir Keir Starmer interview