Labour’s leadership hopefuls are in for the toughest vetting of their careers – and it’s only a taste of what awaits

Editorial: They’ll be grilled about the NHS, Trident, economics, drugs, and their working class credentials, all while battling to make their party look credible again

Thus far, the Labour leadership election has barely registered in the public consciousness. No surprise there. With a Conservative government in command of a thumping majority and four years away from a general election, there is little urgency attached to who wins. The personalities involved are still, mostly, unknown to the voters. Partly, also, it is because the contest hasn’t been especially inspiring.

Away from the Twitterati, the public’s indifference is reflected in the small number of new supporters signing up to vote in the contest in recent days – 14,700 or so, set against the 112,000 and 180,000 newcomers who turned up for the Corbyn surges in 2015 and 2016 respectively.

The most heated argument is around whether the character Mark Darcy in the Bridget Jones books was based on Sir Keir Starmer (or, less likely, vice versa).

Perhaps that will change now that the regional hustings for party members are under way. They kick off in Labour’s very staunchest heartland, Liverpool. The city is, after all, home to the party’s five safest seats, and where “ooh Jeremy Corbyn” is still enthusiastically sung at Anfield. More than any other city, Liverpool is invested in Labour. In an endurance test that might challenge Jurgen Klopp’s legendary squad, the membership will also have the opportunity to hear from the deputy leadership field – Angela Rayner, Dawn Butler, Rosena Allin-Khan, Ian Murray and Richard Burgon.

Certainly, the five leadership candidates have plenty of unanswered questions. With a few exceptions, the campaigns so far have been epitomised by boiler-plate socialistic green-tinged platitudes. These have been garnished with a ridiculous “prolier than thou” competition to see who boasts the most authentic working class or northern credentials.

Even the coded attacks on rivals lack bite. There can, for example, be little doubt whom Rebecca Long-Bailey had in mind when she said that she’d like to end the “gentlemen’s club” of politics. Then again, the only man in the race, Sir Keir, can happily declare that he has never been a member of a gentlemen’s club. He does remind his comrades that they have a “mountain to climb”, and he strikes a deliberately different note to Ms Long-Bailey’s insistence that the party’s manifesto was popular and that its outgoing leader deserves a “10 out of 10”.

Lisa Nandy and Jess Phillips are more keen on telling the party that it will “die” if it fails to change, but thus far seem to lack consistency on their policy solutions. They are not even entirely populist; as the left’s maverick answer to Boris Johnson, they don’t entirely convince.

Some candidates have had their “moments”. While Ms Long-Bailey’s views on abortion have appalled some, Ms Nandy showed an unusual willingness for a modern Labour MP to use the nuclear deterrent and to take a tough stand on Scottish independence – the same tenacity, she says, as the Madrid government shows towards the Catalan separatists.

As for philosophy, Sir Keir has coined “moral socialism”, while Ms Long-Bailey has attempted to soften her Corbynista image by inventing “progressive patriotism”. Emily Thornberry’s pitch seems to be policy-free and entirely reliant on her abilities, formidable as they are, to be a rather well-spoken “battle-hardened” political street fighter, a T-34 tank in human form.

The Labour membership and the wider country deserve to know a good deal more about what the wannabes stand for. Now is the time to resolve that.

All have signed up, for example, to the 10 pledges recommended by the Board of Deputies of British Jews to fight antisemitism. All – because of moral and legal force – will agree to abide by the judgements of the Equality and Human Rights Commission on how Labour has dealt with, and will deal with, the antisemitism in its ranks.

It would, though, also be instructive to hear more from the candidates about why they think this happened to their party, and specifically what, if anything, they personally did in the shadow cabinet or elsewhere to hold the Corbyn leadership to account for its failures.

No political party stands any chance of forming a government unless it can also prove its economic competence. Not since 2005 has Labour convinced the electorate that it has the best policies and personalities to deliver rising private living standards and better public services through sustained economic growth.

New Labour, at its best, was about demonstrating, during opposition and then in power, that social justice and economic efficiency were not incompatible, and indeed were complementary to one another. The undoubted power of free markets in allocating scarce resources in a free society was tempered with targeted intervention and clearly delineated priorities – “education, education, education” as the mantra rang.

For all the fashionable disparagement of the work of the Blair governments, they remain the last time that the British people were inclined to trust Labour with the economy. They were much more than a mere continuation of Thatcherism. The not-very-famous five now running for the top job do not have to copy Tony Blair, but they face exactly the same task he had in the 1990s: to restore the party’s reputation with the public on the traditionally pre-eminent issue.

In the post-Brexit era, that old slogan “it’s the economy, stupid” falls readily to mind. Even if the Tories are failing badly by the mid-2020s and the country is mired in recession, the electorate will still need convincing that Labour would not actually make matters worse.

A substantial programme of nationalisation, a spending programme running into the trillions and a seemingly endless list of “free” goodies did not convince the voters last time round. The next leader will need to be precise when she or he is asked: who would pay more tax? How much will be borrowed? What will the money be spent on?

There are many other challenges. How will the party win back its base in Scotland? That’s a question where Mr Murray, the only Labour MP in Scotland, offers a unique perspective. Does the party want the UK to rejoin the European Union? If so, on what terms? If, like Ms Long-Bailey, leadership contenders say they’d like to abolish the House of Lords, then what, if anything, will its replacement be? How will they reform the monarchy? They all take the climate crisis seriously – but what target date would they put on making the UK carbon neutral? And, moreover, how will they get enough electric cars on the roads, planes out of the sky and gas boilers scrapped to secure that goal?

And then there will come the personal questions. Have they taken drugs? What is their attitude now? What is the naughtiest thing they’ve ever done? How do they unwind? The price of a litre of fuel?

It’s during the hustings and in the TV and radio studios that these candidates will be tested. And so they should be. In place of a formal system of open primaries, it is the only chance the party’s members and the country has to assess their mettle. Are they effective communicators? Have they the authority to lead the party in a direction it may not necessarily wish to go? How will they stand up to the media attacks? Have they the brains and the stamina to become a good prime minister?

The next few weeks will be tough on them – but it will be a mere introduction to the stresses of the next four years.