‘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

Ed is so keen not to be seen to be ‘dissing the other candidates’ that he is far less fluent on the Labour leadership race than on the other subjects we discuss. His time in America — he lived there several times in his childhood and for a year in his thirties when he studied at Harvard — has clearly influenced him. He says, almost wistfully, that ‘American politics is always fascinating because it’s bigger, more spectacular, at the centre of the world.’ He bemoans how we lack America’s sense of optimism; complaining that if the BBC was American they ‘would spend their time celebrating it, being proud of it, going on about how brilliant it is that everybody listens to the BBC World Service, talking about its civilising influence, all of those things’, but instead we, being Brits, spend our time complaining about how the BBC pays Jonathan Ross too much.

It is, though that very British thing, ‘the spirit of the blitz’, that he wants to find a way to tap into now. He talks warmly about how his father, who came here as a 16-year-old refugee from the Continent, was inspired by that spirit. ‘What we have to search for as a country is a sort of modern form of solidarity,’ he says.

When I ask him to name his heroes, he lists three sportsmen. But this is not a classic New Labour answer, since none of them are footballers and all are slightly odd choices of which a spin doctor would not approve. The first is the Yorkshire and England batsmen Geoff Boycott. It turns out that Miliband saw his 100th century at Headingly and bunked off school to see his final innings at Lord’s. The second is Jimmy Connors and the third is the snooker player Alex Higgins. As we try to work out what ties these three together, Ed suggests that it is ‘the charisma of imperfection’. It is an odd thing for a politician with such polish to admire.