The Labour leadership candidate Lisa Nandy has defended the Duchess of Sussex

against Piers Morgan’s claims that she has not suffered racism, asking the TV presenter
“how on earth” he would know about the prejudice experienced by people of colour.

Nandy took Morgan to task as she appeared on his Good Morning Britain show for ITV,
telling him that Meghan had received harsh treatment from some parts of the media.

Nandy was being interviewed as part of a broadcast round after winning the
crucial backing of the GMB union, meaning she is likely to make it to the next round of
the Labour leadership race.

But she ended up clashing with Morgan over racism as he insisted that complaints by
the Duke and Duchess of Sussex about the press had “nothing to do with her skin colour,
nothing to do with her gender” but were all about her not liking negative coverage.

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Nandy replied: “If you don’t mind me saying, how on earth would you know?

“As someone who’s never had to deal with ingrained prejudice, you’re not in a position
to understand people who have. And I think there were a lot of people who signed that
letter who have.”

She added: “I think Britain is a much more decent country than some sections of the
media would have us believe. The way Meghan Markle was treated, I didn’t like it at all.”

Nandy’s father, Dipak Nandy, was an Indian-born academic. He founded the racial
equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust and helped draft the 1976 Race Relations Act.
He staged sit-ins at a Leicester pub in the 1960s, which at that time operated a colour
bar.

Earlier on Wednesday, Nandy took a robust tone on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme as
she said the presenter, Nick Robinson, had asked a “daft” question when inquiring who
she thought was the best Labour leader in history.

Despite having backed Owen Smith’s challenge for the Labour leadership in 2016, she
defended Corbyn’s record and blamed the press for having “trashed” him.

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She was also critical of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown for not doing enough in the 1990s
to overturn Margaret Thatcher’s economic legacy.

“I’m not going to trash the legacy of the last Labour government because things like the
minimum wage were complete game-changers in towns like Wigan, and the investment
that went into health and education was really important.

“But it is certainly true to say that the consensus that Thatcher built lasted all the way
through the New Labour years.

“I came into politics after 10 years working in the voluntary sector with homeless
teenagers, first of all, and then with child refugees.

“And the reason I did was out of frustration with a system under the last Labour
government that took small amounts from people at the very top of the system and
handed it with conditions to those at the bottom.”

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