James Forsyth reviews the week in politics
From a distance, Tony Blair might be able to persuade himself that the Labour party contest now underway is the fulfilment of his dreams. The ‘brothers’ everyone is talking about are not trade union heavies but two Oxford PPE graduates who have worked their way up through the New Labour machine. But to listen to what they say, there is scant evidence of Blair’s election-winning philosophy. The candidates are outbidding each other on making punitive levels of taxation on the rich permanent, denouncing Labour’s rapprochement with big business and committing to abolishing tuition fees.
Not that anyone is listening much to what they say. At Monday night’s hustings there were no television cameras — their absence a nasty reminder to the candidates of the diminished status of opposition. When they do appear on television, as they did on Newsnight on Tuesday, they are treated like dancing fleas — not big beasts of the political jungle. In the House of Commons, the Miliband brothers are offering friendly waves to people whose existence they barely acknowledged before.
But this leadership contest matters in many ways. Historically, it would be unusual if the leader of a British party with as many seats as Labour has now (258) did not become the next prime minister. The reason that the Lib Dems are in the Cabinet is not because they did well but because Labour got far more seats than expected. George Osborne, who remains the Tories’ chief tactician, is taking a keen interest in the contest because he believes it will play a part in determining the political opportunities for the coalition government.
One does not need to be a political obsessive to find the Labour contest intriguing. The spectacle of two brothers running against each other makes the hustings surprisingly compelling viewing. Adding to the oddity of it all, Ed Miliband is running in large part on what his family background taught him — the Milibands are the son of the Marxist thinker Ralph Miliband. This produced the bizarre spectacle on Monday night of David earnestly taking notes as his brother talked about growing up in the Miliband household. With every encounter things are getting increasingly less fraternal and the smiling high fives they exchanged at the end of Monday’s hustings may yet be replaced by a butt of malmsey.
Watching David and Ed, you see two quite different characters and two quite different approaches to winning the leadership. There is a touch of Michael Portillo about David: he wants the leadership but only on his terms. Miliband major has made it a theme of his campaign that Labour must stop asking its members to choose between their families and the party — that is to say, politicians should have time to see their spouses and children.
David Miliband gets quite passionate about his plea that a leader should have time off. At Monday night’s event, he demanded with feeling that the candidates have a non-campaigning pledge for part of August so they can all go on holiday. At times, his eye-rolls and body language suggest that he could imagine better uses of his time than yet another hustings. When you remember that there are at least 48 more of them between now and polling day, you can see his point.
Nor is David an instinctive panderer. When an audience member asked the candidates at Monday’s hustings if they would call themselves socialists, he replied rather grudgingly that ‘it says on the Labour party card that we are a democratic socialist party, and I am happy to subscribe to that’. His younger brother, by contrast, delighted his audience by answering with an emphatic ‘yes’ and declaring that he was in politics because of the ‘injustices a capitalist society throws up’.
Ed Miliband’s great strength in this contest is his emotional connection with Labour audiences. He tells them that ‘too often we were embarrassed about our party and our movement’, and pledges that he’ll ‘never leave the party behind’. In turn, they think he is one of them: they trust him and want him to succeed. This approach irritates some members of the shadow Cabinet. In private, one, who is backing his brother, derides him as ‘comfort-zone Labour’.
David, though, has found a way of putting something between Ed and the Labour party’s heartstrings: he got Diane Abbott on the ballot, even going as far as to sign her nomination papers. Abbott is a real lefty and as good a platform performer as any of her rivals. She gives the audience some of the old religion and they love it. This makes it harder for Ed to woo them, as their hearts are already somewhere else. While regarded as lazy and arrogant by her fellow MPs, Abbott will do well with party members and individual trade unionists.
Perhaps the greatest surprise of the contest, though, is how good a campaign Ed Balls is having. If Tories could vote in the contest, he’d win by a mile. Tory Cabinet ministers joke that they’ll do all they can to boost Balls’s leadership bid. Watch him on TV and you can see why. But at these hustings, he’s a different proposition: confident, commanding on policy and — surprisingly — funny. Revealingly, his strategy at these events is to suggest that he and David Miliband are the two potential leaders. He implicitly dismisses Ed Miliband as someone incapable of taking a decision — a criticism frequently made of him in Labour circles and one reinforced by his handling of the manifesto process. Balls knows that his best chance of winning is to get this down to a Balls-Miliband two-horse race.
If Balls is surprisingly good, Andy Burnham is shockingly bad. He comes across like a political munchkin in comparison to those he is on stage with. One Labour MP described Burnham’s performance at Saturday’s hustings as ‘just embarrassing’.
Labour elects its leader through an electoral college — made up of Labour MPs and MEPs, trade unionists and party members — using the alternative vote. This makes the result particularly hard to predict. In the 2007 deputy leadership election the favourite was Alan Johnson. Jon Cruddas won the most first-preference votes — but Harriet Harman ended up winning by hoovering up second- and third-preference votes.
In this five-candidate race, the battle of the Milibands will probably come down to the obscure labyrinths of second preferences. So far, the only candidate to make public his second preference is David who has said he’ll be voting for his brother (an implicit plea that his brother’s supporters do him the same favour).
If the alternative voting system favours the least offensive candidate, then Ed Miliband’s luck could be in. But to pip his brother for the post, he’ll need to be prepared to show some leadership — even if that means going against what the party wants to hear.
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