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Tuesday 22 May 2012

Of Course Labour Should Pick David Miliband. Who Else is There?

Sunday, 29th August 2010

So, a "well-placed*" source tells the Guardian that while David Cameron would like Ed Miliband to be the next leader of the Labour party, he thinks the party would be best-advised to select Ed's brother David. This news, scarcely earth-shattering to anyone who isn't already a Labour party member (and obvious even to many of those that are) has Labour types suspecting some Deep Tory Game is Afoot.

Is this a bluff? Or a double bluff? Or a diversion? Or something else entirely? Both Sunny Hundal and Labour List's Alex Smith took to their Twitter accounts to warn that this must be some devious Conservative plot. Rats are everywhere and leadership elections are especially prone to infestations.

Well, maybe. I'd say only this: David Miliband is manifestly the most impressive candidate in a mediocre field and Labour, if it wants to win elections rather than just feel good about itself, would be stupid to pick anyone else.

Miliband's interview with the Independent on Sunday today demonstrates this once more. There's plenty with which to disagree but that's not the point. The issue is that Miliband seems to be asking some of the right questions and has a palpable awareness that Labour must, shockingly, actually talk to people who didn't vote Labour and take their concerns and views seriously. The piece is worth your time.

Anyway, this also struck me as interesting:

I said in my announcement speech that party renewal stopped on 2 May 1997. and I said on Wednesday that sadly I think Tony in his own way did love the Labour Party but too often he defined himself against the Labour Party. I think he still does love the Labour Party actually but, as he always used to say, he hates losing, which is a different thing.

In Labour's present predicament it's impossible for a new leader to be as bold as Blair. The timing and the situation is wrong. But, yes, Blair did define himself against his own party and this - a lesson learned from America and, in some respects, from Thatcher - was a major contributor to his great triumphs. David Cameron, again because of the peculiar nature of the Tories' plight, was able to try the same trick with some measure of success too.

But Miliband actually gets Blair right here: Blair won because he was able to convince his party - at least for a while - that they really were a bunch of losers and that if they fancied winning for a change things were bloody well going to be different. The public, disliking political parties, likes to see them cuffed around by their leaders. It cheers the punters up to see the true believers put in their place.

As Miliband says, Blair liked winning more than he liked the Labour party. I wouldn't be surprised if Cameron, deep down, thinks along the same lines. Certainly he seems - as Simon Heffer and plenty of blog commenters often remind us - ambivalent at best about parts of the Conservative party. (Though Cameron, of course, is more of a Tory than Blair was ever really a socialist.)

Still, this also helps explain why there's no heir to Blair in this contest and why even the closest thing to it - Miliband (D) - has to tiptoe gently around the Blair Legacy. Nevertheless, he is the candidate best placed to rise above the party and, in so doing, change it for the better.

The others? Come off it. Ed Miliband is an actual, proper lefty. Ed Balls? Well, a great man for opposition (he'll probably claim a cabinet scalp at some point during this parliament) but not, no really not, the kind of chap the country will vote for. Burnham? Who he? Which leaves only dear old Diane. Well, quite.

So, my Labour friends, this really isn't a Tory psy-op. David Miliband really is the best you have. But I don't know if you're really ready for him and anyway his biggest problem is that he isn't Tony Blair...

For more on all this, I recommend this post by my old chum Iain Martin.

*An increasingly common - and questionable, flag-raising - attribution. Readers are invited to speculate on the extent to which any well-placed source is actually well-placed to impart new or useful or even interesting information or whether well-placed might actually be a cunning euphemism for "chap who was available to comment/answered the phone/was in the same pub..."

Filed under: Balls (3 more articles) , David Miliband (215 more articles) , Ed Miliband (696 more articles) , Labour leadership (387 more articles)

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DavidDP

August 29th, 2010 7:16am Report this comment

He has a slightly terrifying view of government though; his recent Times article said that without the State, people are alone.

Rhoda Klapp

August 29th, 2010 8:38am Report this comment

Well, maybe the torture thing is a factor. Who else is there? Nobody really.

Steve

August 29th, 2010 9:45am Report this comment

Well said Alex,

But it's worth remembering that despite all of blair's modernising Labour is just as notorious today for all of the same reasons it was notorious thirty years ago. High taxes, high spending, massive fiscal deficit, loony pc laws,distrust or hatred of the private sector, implacably opposed to public service reform, can't be trusted on defence and the idea that hating Tories is the answer to everything.

Now it's fair to say that a lot of these things creeped back under Brown, but remember Blair did not rein him in when Brown was doing his destructive work at the Treasury. Instead, the great moderniser settled back for easy short-term arguments such as investments vs cuts and the Tories are evil. Blair let the labour party get the better of him, and the country will suffer for this for years to come.

Barsacq

August 29th, 2010 11:17am Report this comment

"Ed Miliband is an actual, proper lefty." Laughable! How did the author of this guff become to be a political commentator? Old school tie?

DavidDP

August 29th, 2010 11:43am Report this comment

" a cunning euphemism for "chap who was available to comment/answered the phone/was in the same pub...""

Or - here's one I made up earlier....

canonalberic

August 29th, 2010 1:40pm Report this comment

The interview with Milliband is indeed commendable. Like all his unwise exposures of himself to the media (even in his "My London" feature in the Evening Standard on Friday he came over as strange) the unreal real man keeps peeping out of the absurdly spun apparatus inside which he operates.

What isnt boring and conceited is insincere and often quite sinister. Even his own brother, for gods sake, thinks hes not up to it, and he isnt.