Miliband far from Shermanesque in his denials

David Miliband was on Adam Boulton’s show today and described reports that he is manoeuvring for the leadership as ‘fiction’. But his denial of interest in challenging Brown left him plenty of wriggle room :

"I am not in the market for any job other than the one I have at the moment.”

Sherman, a Union Civil War General, denied all interest in running for president in1884 with the statement "If drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve." As long as Miliband avoids being this clear about his intentions, the rumours will continue to swirl.

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The Taliban's changing tactics

Helmand Province, Afghanistan
I have adopted the Gordon Brown strategy and disappeared after a bad by-election result for Labour. My excuse is that I’m now in Afghanistan, finding out how things are in Helmand.

Afghanistan is an amazing country whose people combine abject poverty with the ability to endure weather of -20c in winter to 50c in summer. Such hardiness makes for resolute fighters, but it seems the Taliban have failed to recruit for this season. The poppy harvest ended three weeks ago, and the fighting usually starts immediately as the hired $10 Taliban” swap ploughshares for Kalashnikovs. Not this time, though. As one solider told me “the problem with the $10 Taliban is they receive $0 training and get killed.”

It seems they have given up. Fighting was expected to start three weeks ago but hasn’t.  Instead the Taliban have switched to roadside bombs and suicide attacks—I’m told about one a fortnight now. The Kandahar air base took four mortar attacks last week (including the one that delayed Nick Clegg’s departure though I’m told he was miles away from the explosion). This makes a total of 16 attacks this year; menacing but a mark of our military success if the Taliban are switching tactics.

It is too early to tell if this pattern will hold, but the soldiers I have spoken to are optimistic. They routed the Taliban in the winter denying them the traditional time to recover. They have also killed most of their leaders; a powerful blow against a movement that relied on the charismatic and self-styled heirs of the Mujahideen.

I have been in Kandahar and Camp Bastion and am off to learn some more. So it will be radio silence from me for a while. I hope to come back with a full report next week.

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Miliband on manoeuvres

The Sunday Times reports this morning that David Miliband is readying himself for a run at the leadership. A source close to Miliband tells the paper that “David is not going to do anything until a vacancy arises, but he is ready to go for it. There will be no public display from him in the next few weeks but he and his supporters will be making it clear to backbenchers that there is an alternative to Gordon.”

Miliband’s plan reflects a phenomenal sense of entitlement. He plans to leave to his colleagues the grubby and difficult task of prising Brown from Number 10. He will then glide into the leadership contest expecting the support of those who have just risked their careers to remove the Prime Minister.

The question Labour MPs have to ask themselves about Miliband is why would floating voters pick him over Cameron? They are both the very model of a modern politician; young, affable and not particularly ideological. Considering that Cameron has already cornered the market in this, Miliband would have trouble in giving these voters a compelling reason to switch. Indeed, all three party leaders would be remarkably similar but with Cameron as by far the best established brand—something that can only work to the Tory leader’s advantage.

If Miliband was PM, it would mean that Labour couldn’t make a big deal of Cameron and Osborne’s lack of experience in the general election campaign. Such attacks simply wouldn’t seem credible coming from a party led by a 42 year old. One also wonders whether Miliband—who was too frit to challenge Brown for the leadership last year—has the essential toughness that a Prime Minister needs.

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Campbell to Cherie: I never swore at your hairdresser

There is a classic letter from Alistair Campbell in The Times today disputing Cherie Blair’s account in her book of how Campbell swore at her hairdresser.
 

Sir, Before “you’re only a f***ing hairdresser” replaces “we don’t do God” as my most quoted remark, could I make clear that while I did say “we don’t do God” to an American magazine journalist, I have never described Andre Suard as “only a f***ing hairdresser” to anyone. There are other direct quotations attributed to me in your recent serialisation of Cherie Blair’s book which were not accurate, but this is the one I would like to deny, not least since it goes against the rule I have tended to operate most of my working life, which is to save my harshest words for colleagues at or above my level within the organisation. I think people I have worked for, and who have worked for me, would confirm this as my general approach.

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Miliband's gift to McCain

John McCain and Barack Obama have been involved in a fierce back and forth about Obama’s willingness to meet with the Iranian leadership without preconditions. McCain claims that Obama’s willingness to do this shows that he does not have the judgement or the experience to be commander in chief, while Obama argues that McCain’s refusal to sit down with America’s enemies proves that McCain comes from the George W. Bush school of diplomacy.

David Miliband has now waded into this debate. The Times reports that when Miliband met with Obama’s foreign policy team he queried the wisdom of Obama’s proposed approach.

This is fantastic news for the McCain campaign who will be delighted that this news has leaked out. They can now argue that Obama’s idea would so embolden the Iranians and alienate America’s allies that the British Foreign Secretary has had to fly across the Atlantic to warn him off it. It will hugely help them in their efforts to portray Obama as outside the mainstream on this question. If it is not just Bush but the British too who won’t negotiate with the Iranians without preconditions it changes the whole appearance of Obama’s stance. Rather than looking like a refreshing change from Bush, it appears dangerously naive.

Miliband is right on the substance. But his people are playing a dangerous game with this leak. If the McCain campaign repeatedly batters Obama with this point, but the Senator from Illinois still wins in November there could be a certain coldness in relations between the Obama administration and the British government.  

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Will Carter get Brown?

Gordon Brown has survived the first 30 hours after Crewe and Nantwich. In public, the cabinet has remained supportive and even among backbenchers those prepared to openly call for leadership contest are few and far between. Behind the scenes, though, things are different—just look at the string of anonymous quotes in today’s papers. But no one is yet prepared to be, in Martin Kettle’s phrase, ‘Labour’s Geoffrey Howe.’

One man to watch in all this is Stephen Carter, the man that Brown hired to create and market ‘new Gordon.’ If Carter were to walk it would be taken as proof that Brown is incapable of change and that Labour has no chance of winning the next election. As one friend of Coffee House, a particularly astute Tory, pointed out to me yesterday, Carter going would—in terms of impact—be equivalent to a cabinet minister resigning.

There are a couple of reasons why Carter might walk. First, he was strongly opposed to the toff-baiting elements of the Crewe and Nantwich campaign but was overruled. If Brown doesn’t start listening to his advice, he might decide that he’s had enough of trying to save the Brownites from themselves. The second reason is more cynical: Carter might conclude that being associated with a government that gets routed could be detrimental to his future earnings potential. It has always been thought that Carter would go back into the private sector at some point; his stint as the Prime Minister’s chief strategist would make him a trophy hire able to dictate his own terms. But if Brown takes Labour down to a defeat equivalent to the Tory one in 1997, then everyone in Downing Street will be tainted by this failure. There’s hardly like to be much competition among private sector firms to hire Brown’s chief strategist in these circumstances.

Unlike most people who work for Brown, Carter does not feel a sense of tribal loyalty to the Labour party so is less likely to be concerned about what quitting might do to the party’s prospects. On top of this, he did not really know Brown before taking the job so is unlikely to feel particularly constrained by ties of friendship. Back in March, one Labour insider was quoted as saying about Carter “He will give it his all for six months. If it doesn't work out, he'll go back to the PR world." 

If Carter goes, expect those he brought to Number 10 to follow him out the door. In the Brown bunker, the rule might be last in, first out.   

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Writing Labour off

Peter Riddell  is rightly regarded as the dean of the Parliamentary press corp. He is not a man prone to exaggeration or over-excitement which is what makes the conclusion to his column this morning so important:

Ministers and MPs have to decide whether to continue with him, or to change leader again in the hope of reducing, if not preventing, electoral defeat.

PS Do see Stephen’s post on why the longer Brown stays, the worst Labour’s defeat will be.

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Why cyclists need to get a jump on life

This morning as I cycled through Covent Garden, Melanie Phillips nearly killed me. Here's how: I often jump red lights in London on my bike. I quite see how irritating it is, but it just feels safer to be in front of the buses. This time though, as I was about to sidle through a red, I remembered that last week in her excellent blog, Melanie accused light jumping cyclists of being "sunk in a pit of moral blackness."  The force of her rhetoric, her obvious anguish affected me so I held firm and waited.

Red, amber, green: I set off. A second later, a taxi on my right swung left straight into my front tyre. The bike fell over, the taxi fled without stopping to see if I was alive. Had I been a foot or so further forward, I'd have been toast.

What's the moral here? Well, that the moral case isn't always as clear-cut as Melanie thinks. I know it sends pedestrians into a fury to see cyclists break the law but remember, we also have a duty to our loved ones to try to stay alive.

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If Labour want to limit the damage, then Alan Johnson is their best bet

One of the reasons that most pundits still think that Gordon Brown will survive is that there is no obvious alternative to him. Personally, I’m sceptical as to whether anyone could now deny the Tories an overall majority at the next election barring some unforeseen event; the public mood really does appear to have shifted decisively against Labour. However, I do think that Alan Johnson would keep the Tory majority down more effectively than anyone else.

Johnson is the best communicator in the cabinet and has a natural rapport with the voters. His life story is attractive and he seems to understand the aspiring classes better than anyone else in government. (Hazel Blears deserves an honourable mention in this category even though she is nowhere near as good a media performer as Johnson). He is also the only figure you can plausibly imagine patching the Labour party back together after Brown has been deposed.

As an ex-union leader, Johnson has appeal to that section of the party but he is also admired by the reforming wing because of his work in pushing through top-up fees and the like. That he is English and hails from London, could help ease Labour’s problems in the south.

The obvious objection to this argument is that Johnson himself has declared that he is not intellectually up to the job. But I think he has good enough sense of humour, to laugh this off pretty effectively. One should also note that his failure to beat Harriet Harman in the deputy leadership contest does raise questions about his campaigning skills.

It is still more likely than not that Brown will lead Labour into the next election. There is no sign yet that sufficient Labour MPs have the stomach for an effort to prise the Prime Minister out of No. 10. But if the polls continue to get worse for Labour and the next set of elections are as disastrous as the last lot, then they might conclude that it is a matter of necessity to change leader. In those circumstances, I suspect that Johnson would look like the most attractive choice.  

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Has anyone seen this man?

Update: In the comments, Emily points to a BBC interview with Ed Balls that I missed. So, I owe Mr Balls an apology. However, I would be even more impressed if Balls went and did one of the big set-piece interviews this weekend.

 

One of the least appealing aspects of the Brownites is how they scarper at the first sign of trouble. So last night on Question Time we had Hazel Blears—who various Brownites were happy to brief was about to be dropped from the cabinet before the locals, on the BBC’s election night special the Labour representative was Chris Bryant who is only a PPS and was hopelessly outgunned by Liam Fox and Lynne Featherstone who are both senior members of their respective shadow cabinets and on the Today Programme we had Harriet Harman who as deputy leader can’t get out of doing these things.

One would thing that the likes of Ed Balls—who spent years destabilising a Labour Prime Minister in a bid to speed Brown’s accession to the premiership—would now have the gumption to come out and defend the Prime Minister. (I’m open to correction on this but I don’t think Balls has done a single national television or radio interview in the past 24 hours). Say what you like about the Blairites, but when their leader was in trouble they all rushed to his support. That the Brownites, who did so much damage to the Labour party in their bid to get their man into the top job, just go and hide when Gordon is in trouble does not speak well of their character or their ability to lead. 

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