IT’S not easy being Liz Kendall. Eons ago, at the start of the UK Labour leadership contest, the smart money was tipping the Leicester West MP as the candidate to watch, the dark horse who could pull off a surprise win against Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper. Back then, Jeremy Corbyn barely rated a mention - a curious footnote to the serious action.

But things haven’t quite worked out that way. Kendall's blunt Blairite messages have jarred with the party’s new membership and she's been forced to watch Corbyn living out her underdog-turns-favourite fantasy.

While the veteran left-winger can now pack out halls around the country, the entire Kendall campaign team struggles to fill a pub sofa when we meet in Edinburgh.

The only member of the public vaguely interested is an elderly gent taking photographs.

“Who is she?” he asks after sidling over to snap her. “Is she an actress?”

He retreats, crestfallen, when he learns the truth.

“Oh, I thought she might have been on the Fringe,” he sighs, shuttering his camera.

Kendall herself, however, seems irrepressibly upbeat.

“I am no longer in control of my diary or life,” she jokes about her hectic cross-country schedule, which today includes a home visit to a local supporter, one Alistair Darling.

Nor does she complain when the conversation turns - inevitably - to her nemesis.

“I can’t pretend to being particularly happy about Jeremy Corbyn being leader of the Labour party,” she says of the outcome now foretold by the bookies.

But can you stay in the party if he wins? Surely you two are irreconcilable.

“Oh, I could never leave the Labour party. I could no longer leave the Labour party than leave my own family. I’ve never leave.”

The Social Democratic Party (SDP) broke off from Labour under Michael Foot in 1981. Do you fear a similar split if Corbyn wins?

“I don’t happen to believe that the party will split. I haven’t heard a single person say they want to leave the Labour party. What I do fear is that we will be out of power for a generation - at least 10 years, if not more. It’s the people who depend on us - the millions suffering with what the Tories are doing - that we’ll be letting down.”

(Shortly after the interview, Cooper warns of just such a split, and Kendall says she’d happily join the new Labour for the Common Good group - dubbed ‘The Resistance’ - which is being set up by the anti-Corbyn shadow cabinet ministers Chuka Umunna and Tristram Hunt.)

Turning to Scottish Labour, what’s her reading of the party’s meltdown? Was sharing a platform with the Tories during the referendum a wrong turn? Funnily enough, given her support from Darling, the chair of Better Together, she doesn’t blame the No campaign.

“Honestly, I think that what’s happened to Labour in Scotland has happened over a long period of time. We lost touch with people, we took voters for granted. Parties always win when they set out a positive and optimistic and confident vision for the future, when they have a broad appeal. That for me is important in working in Scotland. We’ve got show how we are a credible alternative to what the Tories do and have got a strong leadership.”

So there was weak leadership in Scotland? Again, she sidesteps criticism of fellow Blairite Jim Murphy. “As I said before, anybody who gives you a kind of simple, glib answer to what’s happened here would be wrong. But we need to fight back here.”

Kendall’s manifesto for the leadership includes making Labour more “pro-business” and “passionate about wealth creation”, better childcare and more workplace democracy.

She’d keep the student grants George Osborne wants to replace with loans and opposes new anti-trade union laws, but she doesn’t reject outright the Tory welfare bill slashing tax credits.

But one of her biggest ideas is a more federal UK, with power devolved to local communities over welfare, housing, health, education, transport and economic growth.

So what extra powers should be devolved to Holyrood?

“What I’m most interested in is how you devolve powers out of the Scottish Parliament down to local communities,” she says, ducking the question.

“I’ve always believed that decisions, whether about schools, local services, or skills and employment and the workplace, decisions are better taken with and by the people that they affect. My vision is not just of a country where power is devolved from Westminster to Holyrood and the Welsh Assembly, but down to local councils and communities. I don’t want to win power for myself. I want to win it to give it away.”

You haven’t any specific policy areas you’d like to devolve to Holyrood?

“No. I’m more interested in how we get power down to local communities and in the workplace. That’s a radical vision I have for the future.” Radical maybe, vague definitely.

The leadership contest has been dogged by claims of entryism and abuse of process. Is she worried by the influx of new members and supporters? Should the contest be halted?

“The party have assured me that they’ve put all the necessary checks in place. Whatever happens I will obviously accept the democratic vote of Labour party members and supporters.”

What do you make of Nicola Sturgeon?

“I don’t agree with her politics,” she says firmly. “I don’t believe it is right to raise people’s national identity to over and above what we share in common as human beings.”

Do you think she’s talented as a politician? “I always judge people on their ideas, their principles, their values. I am not the sort of person who has some technical view about politics. That’s never interested me, that sort of insider conversation about who’s a great politician.

“I care about ideas and values and principles, and I don’t agree with Nicola Sturgeon.”

Corbyn (him again) has suggested Labour and the SNP working together in parliament. Do you see the SNP as potential partners at Westminster or Holyrood?

“If there are areas where we can ... vote against the Tories and the things that they’re doing, absolutely. I’ll do anything I can to defeat the Tories when they’re making bad decisions.”

It’s been a personally bruising contest - some opponents have sniped at the 44-year-old for being childless, and she had to deny being in a relationship with a recently divorced MP.

Do you regret standing? “No! Oh my God. This has been a huge privilege. Obviously some of the stuff has been utterly vile, but that doesn’t bother me. To be doing this is never something I imagined doing with my life, but I love it.”

So why have you failed at it? The big smile dims and there’s glimpse of the sadness behind it.

“Because, you know, I’ve always been the underdog, the outsider. I wasn’t a member of the cabinet in the last Labour government, I haven’t been a leading left-wing MP leading a protest for 40 years. People didn’t know me. Many people had no idea who I was when I started this but, you know, I’m never one to shy away from doing something different.”