Tell us the truth, Ed

Next Sunday I will be attending a memorial service for Geoffrey Goodman, who died a year ago at the age of 91. Geoffrey was an extraordinary guy, a superb journalist, and simply the greatest man I have ever known. He flew in bombing raids on Nazi Germany in World War Two, having first fibbed about his age to be able to join the RAF early at 17. He toured the country with Nye Bevan during the 1959 general election, watching the master orator and inspiration close up. He was a star reporter and columnist at Hugh Cudlipp’s Daily Mirror at a time when that paper sold five million copies a day. He even spent a year at No 10 working for Harold Wilson in the mid 1970s, assuring me once that more than 12 months at that address was bound to turn anyone mad.

At his funeral last year his daughter Karen imagined what Geoffrey might have said to her by way of encouragement before giving an address to mourners. “Come on,” she pictured him saying, “tell the truth!”

Good advice. Geoffrey’s genius lay in his lucidity, his skill as a popular newspaper journalist to grasp matters of great complexity and subtlety, and then describe them in clear and simple terms. How many times did some of us sit and natter over lunch at the Gay Hussar in Soho while GG quietly listened and absorbed all the excited (and, frankly, slightly pissed) talk, only for him to sum up the conversation in a few magisterial words? “So, what we are saying…” he would begin, and suddenly it would all be clear.

Very often Geoffrey would return to the theme of courage. He agreed with Dr Johnson – near whose house in Gough Square he spent so many years broadcasting for LBC in its former home – that courage was the greatest of the virtues, for without courage little else worthwhile could be achieved. One question would recur frequently in his analysis of the political scene and its leading figures: “Has he got the guts?” (or, in less PC language, “balls”). Geoffrey was tough: not too many people stood up to Robert Maxwell in the way he did, or managed such a long career in journalism with both sanity and integrity intact. Hardened by the experience of poverty in childhood and active service in war, he was never “frighted by false fire”, as Hamlet says. But along with toughness came also immense compassion and generosity.

How he would have relished the current scene, the disarray in the Conservative ranks and the potential for a return to government for Labour. He was an admirer of Ed Miliband, and warmed to him, but… “Has he got the guts?” Geoffrey would have urged Ed to speak more plainly, more directly, to hedge less, and to level with the people about the size of the task facing the next Labour government. But above all he would, I think, have wanted Labour to offer an optimistic vision of the future. About his hero Nye Bevan he would always say: “He got people to believe that their dreams could become reality.”

In that sense forgetting a line or two in a conference speech is neither here not there. And Labour have been lucky, again, that the Tory/Ukip hate-fest has exploded just in time to distract everybody from what was clearly an underwhelming Labour party conference.

All the more reason why leading Labour figures, and Miliband in particular, should be able to press home their advantage this autumn. Challenge the idea that talking about the NHS, jobs, housing, apprenticeships and an increased minimum wage represents a “core vote” strategy. Explain that different leadership is needed to build a different kind of economy. Expose Tory weakness, and the dead-end nonsense of Ukip. And do all this with a smile on your face and “a song in your heart”, as a former Labour chancellor put it.

Sneerers and bullies can be defeated if you have the courage to confront them and take them on. Miliband has done so before. He is at his best when he fights back. Labour has a strong and coherent offer to make. And so, like Geoffrey Goodman, I say: come on Ed, tell the truth!