Lucy Powell has hit out at the “sexist” framing of her deputy Labour leadership campaign, with people claiming she and her rival, Bridget Phillipson, are standing as “proxies” for two men.
With the contest to replace Angela Rayner under way this week, the pair have been forced to contend with political rumours that they are stalking horses for a future leadership battle.
It has been heavily speculated that Andy Burnham, a longtime ally of Powell, is among the senior Labour figures eyeing up a leadership challenge if the prime minister’s recent turmoil continues. Phillipson, meanwhile, is seen as a Keir Starmer loyalist.
Powell, the MP for Manchester Central and former cabinet minister, lost her role as leader of the Commons in the recent reshuffle. According to a survey by LabourList, Powell is 17 percentage points ahead of Phillipson in the contest.
Asked if her campaign was essentially a “stalking horse” for Burnham, she told BBC’s Political Thinking podcast: “It’s just Westminster bubble obsession that, isn’t it?
“Really, you’ve got two strong women in an open and transparent contest. And instead of talking about the two strong women, everybody’s talking about this being a sort of proxy for war between two men, which, quite honestly, I find kind of sexist.”
She had warned previously that the contest must not be turned into a shadow battle between Burnham and Starmer, telling the Manchester Evening News: “Woe betide anyone who wants to try and tell me that I’m subservient to some other man. I’m probably more alpha male than most men I know.”
Powell insisted her aim for the deputy Labour leadership was to unite Labour’s values with the voters its politicians claimed to serve.
Asked if she would be proposing ideas before Rachel Reeves’s budget, Powell said: “I think it’s really important that I don’t, and we don’t in this contest try and sort of write some alternative budget or some alternative policy programme.
“But I am here to say, look, let’s communicate much more strongly what our values are, what our motivations are, whose side we are on, and connect that back to our communities through our great movement which is our strength.”
Powell, who once described herself as an “egg-breaker”, said it was clear lifting the two-child benefit cap “would be the single biggest policy we could do to address child poverty” and she urged ministers to be clearer about wanting to scrap it, adding: “The question is how and the when.”
She added that her campaign drew lessons from her Manchester constituency, where older, working-class voters in the outskirts of the city coexisted with younger professionals in the centre. “It’s how we unite them together,” she said. She argued it was wrong for Labour strategists to be focused only on one type of voter, or attempting to “out-Reform” Nigel Farage’s party.
Powell said it was a “kind of shock but not a total surprise” to lose her cabinet job as Commons leader, but she claimed maybe she was passing on too much honest feedback to No 10.
“I know I’m not really in the in-crowd, and I don’t really sort of play some of the parlour games,” she said. “I had fed back things that weren’t, with hindsight – maybe I thought I was doing the job I was supposed to be doing – but maybe that wasn’t feedback people wanted to hear.”
