ED: The Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader by Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre is a much better book than it has been given credit for.
The making of a really good biography requires research, insight and some good gossip. The trouble is that Ed Miliband has not done anything particularly interesting except to be Gordon Brown’s bitch and trample all over his older brother to become leader of the Labour Party.
That is why I would recommend the reader skim through the first few chapters, which basically come to the conclusion that his friends thought he was dull and geeky. The splendid Vincent Graff used to co-present an LBC show when they were sprogs and came to the conclusion that Ed was, ‘very nasal, very serious, very focused and quite dull…there was never any laughter in the Green room, it was almost like he was doing a job’.
And this is the trouble with Ed. He spent his childhood arguing politics with his mum, dad, brother and the good and the great. He doesn’t have something that Dennis Healey said was so essential for a successful politician: a hinterland. The poor fellow just has no other interests in any else but politics, policy and the Labour Party. That’s not sad, it’s tragic.
The only interesting thing I could find in his early years was that he could polish off a Rubix cube in one minute twenty seconds. I’ll skip over the university years out of kindness. No girlfriends, little alcohol, head in books, but used to agonise over which chocolate bars to buy.
Apart from academia the only real job he ever did was to be a researcher on Andrew Rawnsley and Vincent Hanna’s flagship television show A Week in Politics where he was rather impressive. In fact, he constructed the interview that turned Harriet Harman ‘into a gibbering wreck’. He later became her researcher and was eventually poached by Brown’s mob.
And what a mob they were. Ed Balls, a brooding, arrogant, bullying piece of political excretia, and Damien McBride, a poisonous little toad. Ed must have seemed the most normal person there. The Blairites used to sigh with relief when it was Ed who came to brief them on the latest Brown howlings at the moon: ‘Ed was known as the emissary from Planet Fuck as he was the only Brownite who didn’t tell supporters of the Prime Minister to fuck off’.
However, he did have a bit of an explosion. It was over a Blair strategy to promise Brown he would pack his bags then change his mind. This came to a head in 2004, when Brown stormed into Number 10 shouting, ‘When are you going to fuck off and give me a date? I want the job now’. Later, Ed stormed into the Number 10 gatekeeper Sally Morgan shouting, ‘Why haven’t you packed up yet to go? There’s a deal and he’s got to go’.
Where this book really comes alive is during the leadership election. I thought the serious bitterness between Ed and David was a bit of press hype. Sadly not – and it has dismayed and aged their mother, Marion. John Cruddas just couldn’t understand why Ed could possibly stand against his brother: ‘You don’t just fuck over your elder brother’.
Although the book is a fascinating insight into Ed’s psyche, it also digs deep into the total arrogance of David. One thing is clear: because of his constant rudeness and offhand insolence to backbenchers, David deserved to lose. He was the establishment candidate and assumed he would win. And, by God, his people threatened and cajoled.
And so did the establishment. I found it rather scary that at the moment Ed won, party officials, rather than guide him through the media interviews which was their job, went sobbing to the bar. Ed was on his own. ‘The party officials had just pissed off’. What a disgrace.
And if you want to know the real reason he has scrapped the shadow cabinet election, just remember that the overwhelming majority elected by it didn’t vote for him.
This really is a fascinating book. It makes the Borgias look like members of the Frinton Rotary Club. It examines two men who could provide the Drs Freud and Jung with enough material to last them a lifetime.
It is worth a read.
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