The case against…David Miliband

By Hopi Sen / @hopisen

A brief series where, for my own amusement (and possibly ensuring I never work for the Labour Party again), I set out the case against each of the Leadership candidates. The eleventh commandment of internal elections is “Never speak ill of a fellow party member”. It gets broken just as regularly as the other ten, but I shall try to be constructive, not merely critical.

David Miliband has the fund-raising ability, the biggest group of MP and CLP nominations and the highest public profile of the leadership contenders. He was promoted quickly by both Blair and Brown and has been a key figure in the development of the modernised Labour Party since his days on the Social Justice Commission set up by John Smith.

David’s an unabashed intellectual who is admired and liked by those who’ve worked with him.

So why wouldn’t he be the right person to lead the Labour party?

First, there’s the accusation that he lacks the popular touch. Whether it’s being photographed with a banana, or his tendency to talk to an audience as if they were a particularly enthusiastic tutorial group, he has not mastered his own image. When he does try to do “popular”, it can come across as toe curling. So he quotes Yeats to say “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire“, and then says there’s a hill to climb to light the fire. This put your humble correspondent more in mind of Jack and Jill than great poetry.

Alternatively, he sets up some sub-Blair soundbite like his “op-pose, exp-ose, prop-ose” line or a series of progressive adjectives. Generally, these lines aren’t very good. Sometimes they’re toe curlingly bad.

Someone once suggested to me that when David tries to be popular, he’s conscious he’s explaining very complex ideas to the audience in simple language, and that the audience can sense that they’re being talked down to. There’s something in that. Conversely, David can be at his best when he’s at his spoddiest. You get some real fire then, and it can be truly impressive.

David Miliband is a man who knows the world is a complex place with problems that are often multi-faceted and intractible. This does not lend itself well to the clarity and simple certainty we often demand of a leader of the opposition.

The second charge against David Miliband is that he lacks the ruthlessness needed to be a leader in a tough time. He is attacked for considering a challenge against Gordon Brown at least twice, and for considering, equivocating and then ducking the challenge.

This is a little unfair, as challenging the Prime Minister and splitting the Labour party is no small matter, but what is certain is that David allowed the speculation to build to the point where it became toxic, and only then pricked the bubble of hype. This left him looking both weak and disloyal.

A clear choice of total loyalty or rebellion would have been better, and stopped him being adopted as ‘Prince over the Water’ by the incompentent backbench “Blairites sans Blair” faction, a role which damaged him immensely, as he’s since been defined by that role.

Some have said that if someone’s political team (or they themselves) lacks the judgement to spot such an obvious consequence of allowing rumours to coalesce, they are going to have problems in future.

Another point on lacking ruthlessness. David Miliband had a very brief window in which he could have tacked to the left on a couple of key issues after the close of MP nominations. If he had done this, he might well have denied Ed Miliband the political space he has subsequently leapt on to great effect*.

You can look at this two ways. The first is to salute admirable straightforwardness and honesty. The second is to say that elections are about winning, and you do what you need to do to get it done and worry about what happens afterwards later.** David, despite his many advantages, has not done that.

Another example of this can be seen in the way that David’s parliamentary gladhanding is efficient but late – there were already MPs who thought of him as dis-interested in their problems during his rapid ascent up the party hierachy (and not a few who were plain jealous).

These MPs were thus in the mood to be sceptical of proclamations of a new, more open, less patronage based way of doing things. I imagine Roman senators were equally dubious of pledges of republican equality by the dying Emperor’s adopted son.

All of which leaves you with the feeling that despite his impressive campaign team, undoubted intellect and strong sense of strategic direction, David Miliband is a curiously unpolitical politician.

This, in essence, is the case against David Miliband.

Does the Labour party want a leader who, while equipped with intellectual insight, a strong policy agenda and who can lay claim to the political centre-ground that Labour has always won on, is somehow…not party political?

That political doubt strikes at the essence of David Miliband’s case for the leadership – that even if you disagree with him, he is best able to win a general election for Labour.

That sense of some lack of political nous has been highlighted both by the contrasting campaigns of Ed Balls, who has been punchy and vigorous, and that of Ed Miliband, who has been totally focussed on winning the leadership at all costs. In image terms, both the “straightforward Northerner” pitch of Andy Burnham and Diane Abbott’s left populism show up David’s considered thoughtfulness.

This explains why David Miliband went to Gillian Duffy’s house for a cup of tea at the close of nominations. He needs to show Labour supporters that he does have that popular touch, the ability to score partisan points, and is a skilled campaigner who can win elections.

He must prove he is a Wilson, as much as he is a Crosland.

(I’m doing this series in the order of total MP and CLP nominations, so it’s Ed Miliband, then Andy Burnham, Diane Abbott and Ed Balls next.)

*Instead, one version of events is that David’s team allowed Diane Abbott onto the ballot in part to deny that space to more credible candidates. I’ve no evidence whatsoever for this, except it’s reasonably clever, so I like the idea of it.

** For example, David Cameron promising to leave the EPP to secure the Eurosceptic bloc.

Hopi Sen also blogs here.