Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy Speaks to T&G on the Conservative Party and More

Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy has failed to defend Angela Rayner's comments about the Conservative Party after Labour's deputy leader described them as "scum."

Speaking to Isabel Hardman and Tom Newton Dunn for T&G on Sunday (from 10am this morning), she said:

It's not my preferred choice of words. I'm not very interested in insulting the Tories. I just want to get rid of them. I think they're doing enormous damage to people in this country. I'm as angry as Angela is about the damage that they're doing, but I'm less interested in talking about them and more interested in putting forward an alternative, because in the end, we can oppose the Tories as much as we like but people only vote for an alternative...

IH: Should she apologise?

LN: It's up to Angela. She apologised in the chamber when she used language like that before. It's completely up to her and you'll have to ask her what she wants to do. But, I mean, from my point of view we're not going to apologise for being angry. But being angry isn't going to get us a Labour government. We've got to show that we can provide that real alternative. And that's exactly what Keir is setting out today.

And she's dismissed the row over the Labour Party's leadership rules:

What he (Keir Starmer) is trying to do is make sure that we're less focused on internal wrangling in the future and that we're able to look outwards to the country. I think that's the right thing to do. I have to be honest, it doesn't excite me enormously. I've never really paid huge amounts of attention to the leadership rules. As you can probably see, because I came a very low third in the leadership contest. Perhaps I ought to have paid a bit more attention in the past and perhaps we'd be having a different conversation today.

---

Times Radio brings you the latest breaking news, expert analysis and well-informed discussion on the biggest stories of the day, delivered with warmth, expertise and balance.

Subscribe here

We are the UK's newest digital news radio station, bringing together the peerless journalistic expertise of The Times and The Sunday Times with the world-class speech radio and podcasting experience of Wireless.