‘I see myself as a Cameron figure’

28 August 2010

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James Forsyth meets Ed, the ‘normal’ Miliband, who says that the conventional political wisdom about Middle England is all wrong

This electoral analysis is premised on the idea that the conventional wisdom about Middle England, that mythic place where elections are won and lost, is all wrong. Miliband argues that London has distorted the media’s view of it, that we forget that only 5 per cent of people in the country earn over £60,000 a year.

At this point, we have a laugh about David Cameron describing himself as middle class. But when I asked Ed what class he thinks he is, he says, ‘I’m middle class’. When I counter that he earns over £60,000, he replies that ‘politicians are slightly in a class of their own, really’.

This Miliband’s appeal to Middle England, though, is going to be about personality as much as policy. At the event where he announced that he would stand for Labour leader, young supporters surrounded him as he left carrying placards reading ‘Ed is Normal’, ‘Ed speaks human’ and the like. The implied contrast was clear: Ed isn’t odd in the way that his brother — the front- runner in this contest — is caricatured as being. Ed isn’t the kind of guy who looks over your shoulder while talking to you.

Outside of the political class, normal isn’t the adjective that would spring to mind to describe Ed. He’s the son of a Marxist academic who has either been working for a frontline politician or has been one himself for the last 16 years and is now running against his brother for the leadership of the Labour party.

But he does have an easy charm, an ability to make people like him. At the last election, his Tory opponent in Doncaster North intended to embarrass him over how little time he spent in his constituency and attack him for not doing enough for the town. By the end of it, she was writing him a letter saying that if she was a Labour member she’d vote for him in the leadership contest.