So why did Ed Miliband stop his brother being leader of the Labour Party? As each month of his uninspiring leadership passes, it becomes more of a puzzle. In today’s Guardian interview, we learn that he can solve a Rubik’s Cube in 90 seconds. Perhaps David Miliband took two minutes, leaving Ed to regard him as being intellectually inferior.
The rest of the interview shows Ed trying to row back towards positions that David Miliband would have adopted from the offset: trying to claim fiscal responsibility, and credibility. The ‘In the black Labour’ movement is also an attempt to repair the repetitional damage being wreaked by Balls, whose calls for even more debt still strike the public as implausible.
An ‘In the black Labour’ policy would have come free with David Miliband’s leadership. During the Labour leadership debate, David Miliband knew that he could win more votes by sucking up to the unions, as his little brother was doing, and backing their plan for strikes. He refused, and accepted the consequences – a decision that made him the candidate chosen by Labour’s MPs and its members, both of whom were outvoted by the unions it its poisonous voting system.
David Miliband knew that Labour will lose if it’s seen as the political wing of the unions, if this great party were reduced to a lobby group advocating more state spending. What about the people, from whose pockets this money is drawn? And you can bet that David Miliband would never have allowed the Tories to nick the revolutionary school reform agenda, which (as Gove admits) was created by Labour reformers such as Andrew Adonis and Tony Blair. The elder Miliband stands in this reforming tradition, now abandoned – at the behest of the unions who supply 85 per cent of Labour’s funds.
I’m told that, when Ed is considering a policy, he asks ‘would David have done this?’. He dislikes adopting policies that could be identified with his brother, because it brings back the painful question: why did he run against him in the first place? Why end his brother’s career? We know (because Ed has told us) that he has great, nay, mysterious levels of confidence and self-belief. Steel, he now calls it. But other than ambition, a love of knitwear and an ability to watch 20 hours of The Killing over one Christmas holiday, what is Ed’s special quality? Might it not have become apparent by now?
I’ve just done a Sky interview with Polly Toynbee, who rightly argues that an opposition leader does not need to get his best policies out now. He should wait until the election. So it may be premature to judge Ed Miliband. Perhaps he is a genius cunningly disguised as a loser. But right now, it seems a very effective disguise. If elections were decided by a Rubik’s Cube competition between the party leaders, then Labour would be home and dry. As things stand, they’re in a lot of trouble.
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