You know those jokes you hear which immediately send you into a furious rage at the fact that you didn’t think them up yourself? At least, I assume you do; I don’t think it’s just a quirk of having a profession whereby your livelihood depends on stuff that other people just do for a hobby.
You know those jokes you hear which immediately send you into a furious rage at the fact that you didn’t think them up yourself? At least, I assume you do; I don’t think it’s just a quirk of having a profession whereby your livelihood depends on stuff that other people just do for a hobby. I was doing the News Quiz on Radio 4 about a month ago, and Fred Macaulay came out with one. ‘Ed Miliband,’ he said, ‘talks like he’s got another mouth inside his mouth, which is trying to say something else.’
He’s like the alien in Alien. It’s perfect, that. Because it works on two levels, doesn’t it? On the surface, you’ve got straightforward abuse, but underneath, serious critique. The outer mouth slams Tory cuts; the inner one worries about the deficit. The outer mouth sounds hawkish over Libya; the inner one is still trying to find coherent reasons to have opposed Iraq. The outer mouth still occasionally spits out the phrase ‘new generation’; the inner mouth says all the same stuff as the old generation. Ed sounds a mess and is a mess. Oh happy satirist day.
Still, at least he takes the focus off everybody else. Out of government for a year, the Labour front bench has the air of the human dregs at the very end of a drunken wedding, full of shouting old wrecks who don’t remember where they live, predatory swingers on the prowl, and bright-eyed teenagers flushed with the thrill of staying up late. The few remaining responsible adults are desperate to leave, but scared about what might happen if they do.
I reckon it would be the same whoever was in charge. Things have just gone weird. It’s quite fitting that there’s a Miliband family drama at the helm, because there are bubbling family dramas everywhere else. You can feel the seeds being sown for the conflicts of the future. Cooper against Balls. Harman against Dromey. Eagle against Eagle. Maybe Berger against Umunna. You think the leadership battle was a soap opera? You just wait until the Christmas special.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder. David Miliband might be smarter and shrewder, and have just the one mouth rather than two, but he’s also a man who withers in the spotlight. A year in the driving seat, and we press would have reduced him down to waving limbs and frothing fury by now; helplessly agreeing with the coalition about almost everything and hating himself because of it.
I suspect Labour isn’t just in trouble because Ed Miliband is rubbish. I also suspect that Ed Miliband isn’t just rubbish because Labour is in trouble. There are cycles to these things. It has to be this way. The Labour party says the wrong things because it’s full of the wrong people, and it’s full of the wrong people because all the right people were scared off by how much the wrong people hated them. This happens with all political parties; in time it will happen with David Cameron’s shiny new Tories. The right people watch from afar, and see the wrong people being wrong about everything, and being beastly to the very few right people who remain, and opt to either stay at home, or join the other lot.
Eventually, of course, the wrong people realise how wrong they are, and for a brief period either start pretending to believe things that they don’t, or just shut the hell up, and the right people take over. And then they win an election, grow in confidence, and start getting wrong again. Right now David Cameron’s Tories are getting wronger and wronger, but that doesn’t matter because Ed Miliband’s Labour hasn’t even begun to get right again. So no matter how many mouths he’s got, neither of them have anything to say.
Last weekend, as you probably didn’t notice because you had better things to do, the Sunday Times misquoted John Prescott. A paragraph mentioned Prescott and ‘another former Labour cabinet minister’ and then there was a quote slagging off Ed Miliband, and then it said, ‘said Prescott’. Prescott denied everything on Twitter and the paper apologised, also on Twitter, blaming a production error. Then the online version changed to ‘said the former minister’.
I wouldn’t know, because I don’t work there, but it looked to me like a sub-editor had got confused about which former minister was saying what, and had reckoned ‘Prescott’ looked neater. Almighty cock-up, deeply embarrassing for the paper, and a source of justifiable fury for the man himself. But nothing sinister. Don’t you think?
Prescott didn’t. ‘Typical of Murdoch newspaper to blame a production worker not the journalist,’ he tweeted. Then he called it a ‘made up quote’ again, expressed incredulity that it could have been a mistake, and started havering on about how this showed that Rupert Murdoch should not be allowed to own BSkyB.
I’m aware that some will sense conspiracy in this, too, because I also work for Rupert Murdoch. But I simply cannot stop turning this one over in my mind. Does our former deputy prime minister genuinely believe a reputable journalist deliberately skewed a story about Ed Miliband in order to have a pop at him, on the front page of a reputable newspaper, on the express orders of her proprietor, and with everybody involved assuming they’d just get away with it? Or is he just briefly in a fury more justifiable than his customary fury, and determined not to waste it?
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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