Dan Hodges

Meet Team Miliband

The political pack behind Ed’s campaign for No. 10

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[/audioplayer]If the opinion polls and bookmakers are to be  believed, some time during the morning of Friday 8 May next year a small group of men and women will appear out of the of the Derby Gate entrance of the old Scotland Yard building on Whitehall, stride purposefully across the road, and assemble at the gates of Downing Street. After having their names checked by the officer on duty they will continue their journey up the famous street, enter via the equally famous and rather imposing black front door, and get to work. That work will involve running the United Kingdom for the rest of the decade.

When Tony Blair was elected Prime Minister in 1997, his senior staffers were household names. OK, they weren’t exactly household names. Except in their own households. And one or two of the households occupied by their political opponents.

But they had managed to forge a reputation for constructing and driving one of the most formidable political operations in post-war British history. Mandelson. Campbell. Powell. Gould. The architects of New Labour.

The group of senior advisors that plan to cross the threshold of Number 10 with Ed Miliband do not have formidable reputations. Their names do not strike fear into their Tory and Lib Dem opposite numbers. If those opposite numbers know their names at all.

They are the architects of One Nation Labour. Or is it the Politics of a New Generation? Or the more prosaic 35 Per Cent Strategy?

Whatever it is, their walk up Downing Street – if and when it comes – will be cloaked in anonymity. Partly this is a reflection of Ed Miliband’s desire to turn his back on the ‘celebrity politics’ of Labour’s recent past. Partly it’s because his advisors have themselves, in the main, shunned the limelight.

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