Caveats about positioning after the event, of course, but Andrew Pierce’s account of the speech that David Miliband would have given on Saturday
is still worth noting down:
“You could have heard a pin drop in the conference hall when the new Labour leader delivered his acceptance speech. Far from being triumphalist, he issued a stark and unwelcome warning that shocked the Party: it had to change, or lose the next election. Only minutes after the applause had died down on Gordon Brown’s valedictory address, his successor savaged Brown’s record as Chancellor and Prime Minister. He mocked the claim that Labour had ended the cycle of boom and bust. He warned that they had to stop burying their head in the sand over the need for swingeing spending cuts. Except that he didn’t, because that’s what David Miliband was going to say in a speech he’d tucked into his designer suit pocket in the confident belief that he — and not his younger brother Ed — would be the 20th leader of the Labour Party.”
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