David miliband

David Miliband blasted New Statesman columnist Mehdi Hasan’s updated Ed Miliband biography yesterday afternoon: ‘Judging by extracts about me in the Mail on Sunday, updates to Ed’s biography should be filed in the fiction section’. The former foreign secretary took umbrage at the suggestion that he had said his brother would ‘crash and burn’. And, just in case we had missed the point, he added ‘i.e. made up’ for good measure. Despite these manifold grievances, the elder Miliband graced the New Statesman’s Labour conference party later in the evening. He waited until Ed had done the rounds and left before entering, tieless. Given that David has pulled in over half

Action over Scotland is certainly producing a reaction in England. It’s not what you’d call an ‘equal and opposite reaction’ yet, but it’s there — and it’s crystallised by Tim Montgomerie’s article for the Guardian this morning. I’d recommend that you read it in full, but Tim’s basic point is that David Cameron could score a ‘triple crown of political victories’ by moving towards a more federal UK: ‘By offering to extend Scottish devolution he can be the Conservative leader who saves the union. By promising to balance Scottish devolution with a commitment to new arrangements for the government of England, he can radically improve his own party’s electoral prospects.

By now, we’re all used to waking up to newspaper columns describing Ed Miliband’s flaws and proclaiming him unfit to lead the Labour party. But today, it’s David Miliband who’s under fire in two articles – one by Roy Hattersley in the Guardian and the other by Matthew Norman in the Telegraph. They’re both in response to the elder Miliband’s New Statesman article, the significance of which Pete wrote about on Thursday. In Hattersley’s case, it’s a direct response, as it is his views that Miliband rejected, labelling them ‘Reassurance Labour’ and saying: ‘The problem with the definition of social democratic politics by the Reassurance Labour tendency is not just

The most curious thing about David Miliband’s article for the latest New Statesman — which is causing quite a stir this morning — is that it should appear now. After all, the Roy Hattersley essay that it purports to be responding to was published, so far as I can tell, last September. That’s five months ago. Which is fine, if it’s really taken MiliMajor that long to get around to it. But it certainly fuels the idea that he has chosen now, this moment, to make a political intervention — and Hattersley is just an excuse. And the intervention itself? Basically, Miliband warns against what he calls ‘Reassurance Labour’, a

Ed Miliband’s poll ratings are going from bad to disastrous at the moment. Last week his YouGov approval rating dropped to its worst ever, with just 20 per cent of respondents saying he’s doing a good job, and 66 per cent saying he’s doing a bad one. And today they slip even further. Again 20 per cent say he’s doing ‘well’, but now 69 per cent say ‘badly’: And, most worryingly for the Labour leader, the number of Labour voters giving him the thumbs down (49 per cent) now outnumbers those giving him the thumps up (46 per cent). That’s compared to the 95 per cent of Tories who think

Was Ed’s Big Speech worth the extended wait? Not really. It wasn’t a stone-cold terrible speech, but neither was it the rambunctious, attention-grabbing number that his leadership could do with. In fact, we could have saved ourselves the effort by simply reading his New Year’s message again. That was considerably shorter, and covered almost all of the same ground. Squeezed middle? Check. Tackling vested interests? Check. An admission that Labour will need to cut? Ch… oh, you get the point. The best that could be said about today’s speech is that it presented some of these arguments more clearly than in the past. Indeed, the attack on George Osborne’s fiscal

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

Unless one of Ed Miliband’s New Year’s resolutions was to ignore absolutely everything going on around him, I expect the Labour leader will be in a particularly glum mood this morning. And it’s not just that Maurice Glasman article — which has inspired the headline ‘Miliband’s former guru says he has “no strategy”’ on the front of today’s Guardian — either. It’s the, erm, questionable tweets from one of Miliband’s shadow ministerial team. It’s the LabourList poll that finds scant support, and much disapproval, for his leadership. It’s that John Rentoul column suggesting Yvette Cooper for the throne. It’s the Tory minister who said to Iain Martin that ‘Keeping Ed

The absence of growth and the importance of credibility are recurring themes in this morning’s papers. John Lord Hutton has told the BBC that revised growth figures make pension reform even more urgent, and he added that the deal that was put before trade unions was ‘perfectly credible’. Meanwhile, David Cameron has insisted that ministers increase their pension contributions by an average of 4.2 per cent (more than the 3.2 average across the public sector) to show that ‘we are all in this together’. Pensions also feature in an Independent on Sunday interview with Tim Farron, the Lib Dem President. Farron says he has ‘sympathy’ with state employees who are caught

Don’t be too hard on the Independent leader writer and proof readers. Ed or David Miliband? It’s an easy mistake to make. John Humphrys got it wrong on the Today programme back in May, and even Ed’s own deputy, Harriet Harman, slipped up. “I hope we will have David, er, Ed, Ed Miliband elected as Prime Minister at the next election,” she told Woman’s Hour during the Labour conference in September. At least Harman corrected herself, as the Independent now have on their website. This Daily Mail article from June still carries the wrong caption. But this affliction is even more widespread than that. Back in July, YouGov showed 1,265

David Miliband was studiously loyal to his brother in his one speaking appearance at Labour conference. He told Movement for Change, the community organising group that he founded, that ‘Ed deserves huge praise’, that ‘Ed has led with purpose and conviction and that ‘we’ll all here because we want to put Ed into Downing Street’ But the brother over the water did come with three warning for Labour. The first was that ‘if Labour becomes a sectional party, we’ll never be elected to government.’ The second was that there’s ‘never been more distrust of the state across the industrialised world’ so if Labour becomes ‘a big state party, we’ll never

Are the seeping knife wounds healing at last? This morning’s Guardian reveals that Ed Miliband has offered his older brother a role as Labour’s “unofficial ambassador on university and college campuses”, and that David Miliband has accepted. Although party sources tell the paper that “this should not be seen as a sign that [MiliD] is being lined up for an early shadow cabinet return,” it surely is a sign that the two brothers are repairing their damaged relationship. From barely speaking to each other to mutually preaching the Labour gospel to a bunch of students. It’s progress.   Putting aside the fraternal aspects of the story, it is also an

It has been a turbulent, ol’ week for Ed Miliband — all the way from those Ed Balls files, through his most substantial speech so far, to that bruising Twitter appearance. By way of putting a full-stop to it all, here’s an interview that our deputy editor, Mary Wakefield, conducted with him in 2007. This is MiliMinor, aged 37, and relatively carefree:  The charm of Ed Miliband, Mary Wakefield, The Spectator, 2 June 2007 Sitting opposite Ed Miliband MP in a large and airy office, the sort of office that befits the Minister for the Third Sector, I suddenly have the surreal impression that I’m at the doctor’s. It’s the