David Miliband Makes a Fool of Himself

I’m not convinced I share James’s view that David Cameron’s “1940 moment” counts as a howler, far less a “quite spectacular mistake” (and I suspect James doesn’t really think it that either). It’s pretty obvious that the Prime Minister simply slipped-up. I think he knows that in 1940 the United States had yet to enter the war and that it’s abundantly obvious that he meant to say that the UK was the US’s junior partner “in the 1940s”.

We know this because in his interview with Sky News Cameron was repeating lines he used in his Wall Street Journal column this week in which he wrote:

I am hard-headed and realistic about U.S.-U.K. relations. I understand that we are the junior partner—just as we were in the 1940s and, indeed, in the 1980s. But we are a strong, self-confident country clear in our views and values, and we should behave that way.

This has the great advantage of being both true and blindingly obvious. The pretence that the US-UK alliance is a partnership of equals is itself silly and something that the press used to hammer Tony Blair, demanding that he extract “more” from the Americans in return for his support – as though foreign policy was purely a transactional business. (Of course, Blair would have been condemned for “selling” British soldiers’ lives for grubby national gain if he’d taken this appoach…)

Anyway, sensible journalists this evening have been asking if Cameron’s acknowledgement of reality is daringly “bold” or risky or reckless or god knows what else.

The interesting, perhaps revealing, thing in all this flap-about-nothing-at-all is David Miliband’s reaction. He tweeted:

 1940 was “our finest hour”. We stood alone v fascism. How can a British PM get that wrong? Its [sic] a slight not a slip.

As a friend suggests, this was a piece of inane hackery worthy of the worst members of the United States Congress (eg, Peter King). It’s not the reaction of a serious politician, far less someone who aspires to lead his party or become the next Prime Minister.

Put it this way: whatever you think of him, could you imagine Cameron reacting in such juvenile fashion had Gordon Brown or Tony Blair made such a slip of the tongue? For that matter, I can’t imagine Blair or Brown responding in this manner – and publicly too – had John Major erred in comparable ways. (Alastair Campbell is, obviously, a different matter.)

One ought not read too much into a single tweet but there’s something about Miliband’s wilfull stupidity that suggests he’s still not quite ready for prime time.

(Labour supporters may complain that Gordon Brown would have been pilloried for making such an error. They’d be right to so complain too. Brown, whatever his faults, was frequently treated appallingly by our vindictively obtuse press corps. So, mind you, was John Major.)

Still, I suspect all this means that the Silly Season has arrived early this year and, consequently, it’s time for everyone to take a holiday.