Liz Kendall’s high-stakes workout

FROM behind automatic doors and beneath pavement vents across urban Britain wafts a tangy cocktail of sweat, chlorine and mortification, usually accompanied by energetic music and the clangs and thuds of weight machines. Catering for Britons’ sedentary lifestyles, gyms are forever opening in converted offices and basements. They are usually staffed by reassuringly intimidating fitness trainers who bark motivational phrases at their wobbly charges: “If it’s not hurting, it’s not working”, “Find an excuse or find a way”, “Winners never quit”.

Bagehot was reminded of these emporia, and their cruel-to-be-kind employees, in a recent conversation with Liz Kendall. The Labour Party MP for Leicester West has long practised and preached the healthy life. She runs almost every day. As shadow health minister she has championed preventative health care; promoting dieting, exercise and stop-smoking programmes, for example. She exudes the flinty cheeriness of a fitness instructor. Her entreaties to her party resemble those gym mantras: “Winning is too important”, “Be the best we can be”, “What matters is what works”.

Ms Kendall’s party is in poor shape. Ed Miliband, its recently defenestrated leader, disowned the centrism of Tony Blair’s New Labour, trying instead to win the general election from the left. The new political map of Britain casts an excoriating verdict on that attempt: Labour is largely absent from southern and suburban England, where it won under Mr Blair, and holds just one seat in Scotland. It needs a 12.5% swing from the Conservatives (more than Mr Blair achieved in his 1997 landslide victory) to win a majority at the next election, in 2020. Until recently the two clear frontrunners in the race to replace Mr Miliband were Andy Burnham, the maudlin tribune of the party’s soft left, and Yvette Cooper, a machine politician and the most experienced of the crowd. But now Ms Kendall—younger, more junior and hitherto little-known—is gaining nominations and momentum.

Partly, her tough message is the reason. Where others hedge, Ms Kendall and her team describe the recent election as “catastrophic”. She urges her party to ditch the “fantasy” that Britons are left-wing. Raised in the middle-class, southern suburb of Watford, she well knows the people Labour must target if it is to win again and exudes the sort of hard-headed practicality that appeals to such voters—mostly avoiding the jargon and circumlocutions that alienate them yet infect the speech of many politicians.

What’s more, she has the makings of an answer to the existential question before Labour (and struggling centre-left parties across Europe): how to make society fairer when money is tight? Ms Kendall’s solution, honed during her career in think-tanks, as an adviser to the Blair government and in a series of recent essays, is reform of the state. She envisages decentralised public services run by employees, citizens and voluntary groups, and is relaxed about private-sector involvement. Speaking to her, your columnist’s impression was of a sceptical social democrat with a liberal’s doubts about central government: she pooh-poohs Westminster’s fusty rituals and mocks politicians’ and civil servants’ faith in the power of speeches, regulations and dictats to get things done.

Ms Kendall’s team is confident that she can win the leadership contest, arguing that—following a candidate-selection-fixing scandal in 2013—the leftist trade unions that made Mr Miliband leader can no longer issue voting papers to their members in envelopes endorsing one candidate. Their members must now opt-in as “affiliates” to vote in the election, where before they were automatically affiliated. Moreover, note the Kendallites, the party’s unambiguously dismal result should shock it into listening to their candidate’s big ideas.

Stuck on the sofa

Yet for all the party’s flab, surprisingly few in it embrace the sort of workout that Ms Kendall offers. As The Economist went to press, some 20 of Labour’s 232 MPs had publicly backed her (though more were expected to do so). Harry Leslie Smith, an influential activist and supporter of Mr Burnham, has accused her of “anti-worker claptrap” and advised her to join the Tories. Even some sympathetic to Ms Kendall’s critique of Mr Miliband’s policies seem reluctant to echo her stark language. And looking like a winner is no guarantee of Labour’s affections: Neil Kinnock, who led it to two election defeats, is more popular among its ranks than Mr Blair, who presided over three stonking victories.

Moreover, Unite, Britain’s largest union, boasts it is signing up 1,000 of its members as Labour affiliates every day. Critics accuse it of withholding their contact details from leadership candidates, so as exclusively to promote its preferred choice to them. Partly for that reason, that candidate, the indulgent Mr Burnham, still stands a better chance of leading Labour than the remedial Ms Kendall.

It remains to be seen whether she has the heft of character and depth of experience required to clear the hurdles before her. This is not to disparage her. Those hurdles are high. Ms Kendall became an MP only in 2010, has no experience as a minister and relatively little in the broadcast media. That she nonetheless remains Labour’s best chance illustrates both her personal appeal and the strength of her analysis.

But it also betokens the lack of more experienced figures capable of hauling the wheezy party out of its comfort zone. When he resigned in 2007 Mr Blair sponsored no challenger to his rival and successor, Gordon Brown. Senior Blairites drifted away from the party as Mr Brown, then Mr Miliband, edged it away from New Labour. Younger ones, like Ms Kendall, are energetic but still developing, so would ideally spend another parliament emerging as national figures before running for the leadership. In politics, as in physical exercise, a good warm-up is crucial.