Liz Kendall: the would-be Labour leader who's happiest when dancing

Name:

Elizabeth Louise 'Liz' Kendall

School:

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Watford Grammar School for Girls

University:

Queens' College Cambridge

Fondness for:

The rapper Dr Dre, Jay Z and Public Enemy. Also running and dancing. She said recently she was "happiest when I'm dancing."

What is her background?

Born in Watford on 11 June 1971 – her 44th birthday approaches – she grew up in the Hertfordshire commuter belt town of Abbots Langley. Her mother was a primary school teacher and her father, who left school at 16, worked at the Bank of England. They insisted that education was a "ticket to a better life" and instilled in her a sense of community. "The first march I ever went on was to get a zebra crossing in Abbots Langley High Street so that the kids could cross." As The Guardian reported, "Kendall's parents embody the sort of aspirational voters the party needs to win back."

How did she get into politics?

Graduating from Cambridge in 1993 with a first in history, she followed a path to Westminster fairly typical of modern politicians: indeed she could be criticised – as Ed Miliband was – for having little experience of "normal life" outside politics. She worked for a charity (Maternity Alliance), a think tank (the Institute for Public Policy Research) and then as a 'Spad' – or special adviser – to two Labour ministers in the Blair cabinet, Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman. She first tried to become an MP in 2001, but failed to win the Labour nomination to replace the retiring Tony Benn in Chesterfield. In 2010 she got the chance to stand in the safe Labour seat of Leicester West, which she held with a majority of 4,017 despite a 7.6 per cent swing away from Labour. In the recent election, she increased her majority, achieving a swing to Labour of 4.8 per cent, against a national average of only 0.3 per cent.

What about her private life?

Liz Kendall is unmarried. She was in a long relationship with the 6ft 8in actor-comedian Greg Davies, who plays the headmaster Mr Gilbert in The Inbetweeners, but announced five days after the May 2015 election that they had split up a few weeks earlier. She told the Daily Mirror: "I am not going to be the sort of politician who does all that stuff about their private life. It's very precious to me and really important I have that space that's personal and just to me." She added that she and Davies remained "really good friends".

What about the Labour leadership?

Liz Kendall announced on 10 May that she would stand as a candidate to succeed Ed Miliband as Labour leader. Although she asks not to be labelled a 'Blairite' candidate, preferring to be known as a 'moderniser', the media are unlikely to grant her that wish: she has made it very clear that Labour needs to return to the centre ground advocated by Tony Blair and the team that won three general elections in 1997, 2001 and 2005.

So, what does she stand for?

She believes the recent election result was "a catastrophe" for Labour and that the party tried to delude itself that the country had shifted to the left when it clearly hadn't. In a Q&A session with political journalists on 21 May, Kendall distanced herself from the Miliband leadership, saying she backed free schools and would fight defence cuts. She claimed that Miliband's headline policy of an energy price freeze had never been believable. She also said she was in a favour of holding the in-out EU referendum, which Miliband had opposed.

What are her chances?

Some within Labour wonder whether she can find the necessary 35 backers among Labour backbenchers – equivalent to 15 per cent – necessary to go forward to the final ballot. There are fears among her supporters that Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper may get so many nominations that there won't be enough left for Kendall. But Labour List, announcing the appointment of Chesterfield MP Toby Perkins as her campaign manager, quoted "bullish" supporters saying: "We've got the numbers. We're in the race."

There are also concerns that she has no front bench experience: as the The Guardian reports, "she has yet to shadow a full secretary of state in the bearpit of the Commons chamber".

However, she is widely reported to make up for her lack of experience with a direct, "human" style, devoid of coded Westminster-speak.

With two other Blairites, Chuka Umunna and Tristram Hunt, out of the race, she is the bookies' second favourite after Burnham and ahead of Yvette Cooper and Mary Creagh, the latter considered a long shot. A recent online poll for Kendall's constituency newspaper, the Leicester Mercury, had 81 per cent of respondents saying "Yes, she's the right choice to replace Ed Miliband", with 19 per cent favouring another candidate.