"Owen Smith has the capabilities not only to win the leadership election, but to become a transformative, radical Prime Minister-in-waiting"Wykehamistwikipedian

After months of uncertainty, the Labour Party has its challenger. Over the long, hot summer, the Labour Party will stage a very public, bloody and visceral battle for its soul.

Thrust from the relative obscurity of Shadow Welfare and Pensions Secretary, Owen Smith is now, in the eyes of many, entrusted with ensuring the survival of the Labour Party. It is no small challenge for a person who has only been an MP for five years, and never held an executive office.

Already, we are being told that Smith does not stand a chance. Up against the well-oiled Momentum machine, commentators are queuing up to announce Jeremy Corbyn as the winner before the contest has even begun. It is a mark of the pessimism in the Parliament Labour Party (PLP) that most tend to agree with this analysis.

However, Owen Smith has the capabilities not only to win the leadership election, but to become the transformative, radical Prime Minister-in-waiting that the Labour Party so badly needs. For me, in just the first week of his leadership campaign, Smith has shown the potential to be exactly the kind of leader Labour craves.

To understand Smith, you need to grasp the internal machinations of the Labour Party. Smith heralds from the much-vaunted but little understood ‘Soft Left’ of the Party. Put simply, the ‘Soft Left’ is essentially the historical mainstream of the party, rooted in the traditions of Neil Kinnock, Barbara Castle and Robin Cook. In recent times, the ‘Soft Left’ has looked to the leadership of Ed Miliband, and his ally Sadiq Khan, the new Mayor of London.

‘Soft Left’ is neither ‘Blairite’ nor ‘Corbynite’, neither Progress or Momentum – and this is the reason why Smith has a chance of winning. His campaign must be rooted in his ability to unify a fractured party, and provide the sort of cohesive leadership that only his wing of the party can supply.

It is essential that the new leadership comes from the ‘Soft Left’ because the cavern between Progress-ites and Momentum-ites is so deep. Corbyn’s victory last summer was the manifestation of generation-long discontent among party activists. It is worth pointing out that a Progress leadership candidate has not been elected since Blair himself in 1997. The party’s internal culture today, scarred by Iraq, MPs' expenses and the perceived iniquities of New Labour, is not likely to elect a Liz Kendall or Tristram Hunt any time soon.

This means that Smith must position himself as a healer within the party, someone who can marry the radical vigour of the Corbyn movement with Labour’s more savvy and – for want of a better word – electable traditions. Already he has made movements in this direction, speaking on the need to recast ‘anti-austerity’ as ‘pro-prosperity’, in a bid to made the left’s economic platform more credible and meaningful.

Here in Cambridge, it will be especially interesting to see how the race pans out. Corbyn’s success last summer was rooted in mobilising young people with an optimistic and hopeful vision of the future. Across the student left, Corbyn’s election opened up a new space for left activism and energies. To have a chance of winning, Smith will need to capture this energy. A good start would be to challenge the expected further increase in tuition fees, which will once again threaten to price aspirational students out of elite education.

Beyond tuition fees, Smith’s best chance comes in positioning himself as a candidate not only ready to build on the Corbyn movement, but also to translate it into a winning platform. In the long shadow of Brexit, Britain needs politicians who are bold enough to offer brave answers to the social, economic and constitutional issues of the day. By embracing a ‘British New Deal’ to “succeed where austerity failed”, one could argue that Smith has already contributed more concrete policy to this debate than Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell have in the past nine months combined.

At this fundamental juncture in British history, we need such imaginative thinking. Brexit will be the biggest shake-up of our national institutions in a generation, and Labour cannot afford to sit on the sidelines while the Tories re-write the script. It might be painful to admit, but under Jeremy Corbyn the party cannot form the united, winning government it needs to protect the British people. It does not make one ‘Blairite’ or a ‘Red Tory’ to make this point: nobody could accuse Owen Smith of being either. But Smith is correct in phrasing his campaign as about ‘Labour’s Future’ because this is where the party must now look.   

Smith can win, and he can unite a fractured party. To do so, he must battle against the entrenched forces of tribal loyalties to ‘factions’ or sides. The historic goal of the so-called ‘Soft Left’ has always been to bring Labour together, and marry its principles to its pragmatism. Only then can we get on with the business of government.