Ed’s challenges

By Paul Richards

There’s only one topic of conversation this morning – and that’s Ed Miliband’s speech. As he looks out over the audience at Manchester Central he will know that most of them didn’t vote for him. He will know that the media is fixated on the future plans of his brother. He will know that the Tories and the Mail are willing him to stumble. He will know that the public are waiting to find out who he is, and what he stands for.

Ed starts with an advantage. He is a consummate public speaker. He won his parliamentary selection in Doncaster in 2005 on the back of an electrifying speech to the party members (helped by a few phone calls from his patron Gordon Brown). He has wowed party conference, speaking ‘without notes’ long before Cameron made it fashionable. He has just come through a gruelling campaign with a speech a day for three months. I saw him speak to over 100 party members in Hastings during the campaign, and they loved him. If anyone can deliver a great speech, it is Ed Miliband.

But Ed and the team polishing up his speech (Phil Taylor, Stuart Wood, Greg Beales, James Morris and Polly Billington) are clever enough to know that this time it’s different. Tickling the tummies of local party activists, or finding the conference g-spot is one thing. Addressing a nation (or that section of it paying attention) is another. It’s like being very good at the piano, but suddenly having to conduct the orchestra. This is a single speech, but with many audiences.

The first is the audience in the hall – we want to be reassured, inspired, given a sense of direction and purpose. The mood of conference is a little like the man who goes on a double date and wakes up in bed with the wrong woman. People look at one another, and wonder what we’ve done. You can hear people humming Oh, Manchester, so much to answer for. The conference needs some reassurance, and perhaps a little challenge. Tony Blair built his speeches around challenges, not echoes of the prevailing views. The leader should be one step ahead of the followers, not the other way round.

The second audience is the commentariat and media, and via them, the politically-interested public. They will give the speech the Emperor’s thumbs-up or down within seconds, and judge whether it has been a success. They build it up into the Speech of a Lifetime, and will knock it down if it falls short. In the real world, there’s always another speech down the line – Liverpool next year, for example – but for the media, there’s only the immediate judgement and the impending deadline. Ed needs to show the media that he’s his own man, that he’s capable of surprises, that he can make the crowd laugh and cry, and that he’s interesting enough to capture the popular mood over the next four years.

Ed will need to speak to the money markets and broader business community. They will need reassurance that Labour is still the party of enterprise, sound economics and has a serious plan for recovery, growth, investment, jobs, the green technologies and most of all tackling the deficit. He will say it was a mistake for Brown to claim ‘boom and bust’ was over (events have proved it beyond doubt). But what will he replace it with?

Around the world, from the White House to the Taliban training camps, Ed’s words on fighting terrorism, on Britain’s role in the world, on climate change, on Iraq and Afghanistan, will be studied for nuance and hidden meaning. With so many lives on the line, this section of the speech needs the closest attention. That’s the difference between winning Labour members’ votes, and being a potential Prime Minister.

Ed Miliband has come a long way since he spent the summer of 1986 helping Tony Benn with his filing. He’s stepped from the shadows of Brown’s Bunker. He’s challenged, and beaten, his older brother. You don’t get to do all that with chutzpah alone. It must take real steel too. Today in Manchester, he must let that inner steel shine through.

Paul Richards’s new book Labour’s Revival is on sale now.