Ed Miliband should take the best advice he can get – his own

Ed Miliband has received a lot of stick recently. The criticism has taken many forms. His style, his demeanour, his policy platform – but some Labour MPs have of late begun to turn on those around him.

It would be unfair to characterise Miliband’s team as lacking in talent. In fact there are a number of thoughtful, smart and experienced people working in Miliband’s office who defend, support and advise him daily. He gets a great deal of advice of course – some of it solicited, some of it (including from this website and other platforms) unsolicited – and it must at times be hard to know who or what to take on board.

But fortunately, Ed Miliband has, working out of his office, one of the best political advisers of his or any other generation.

That adviser’s name? Ed Miliband.

During his time working for Gordon Brown, Miliband was one of the party’s most respected behind the scenes figures. He may have had the nom de guerre “The emissary from the Planet F**k”, but he was an emissary because he was someone serious who even the opponents of Brown knew they could and should do business with.

Unfortunately, some of the strengths that Miliband had as an adviser haven’t always translated wholesale to the world of party leadership. He’s said to admit privately that he can be strategically bold but tactically cautious. That caution can often lead to a kind of political sclerosis, with long (often thoughtful) gaps between public interventions.

Such a style may serve him well as a Prime Minister, with a constant tide of news to react and respond to, but it’s a difficult and sometimes problematic pose to strike as an opposition leader. He has – as his one time boss might have said – at his best when he’s been at his boldest, reacting quickly and decisively to Murdoch and the Mail. But such moments have been few and far between, and are not often enough created by Miliband himself.

So if Ed Miliband was to rely on the strong advice of Miliband the adviser, what might he do? If Miliband listened to Miliband, how might he act?

Two examples are instructive. Two times when Miliband trusted his instincts and acted decisively. Ed Miliband is the man who brought Arnie Graf to the UK, and Ed Miliband is the man who put Jon Cruddas in charge of the policy review. Both of these were smart decisions.

Lets talk about Arnie Graf. He hasn’t just influenced Ed Miliband, or the numerous candidates he’s worked with – he’s also influenced me. I’ve only met him on a few occasions, but I felt sufficiently moved by his work to base our conference rally around his question “Why are you Labour?”.

And I only got to know Arnie Graf and his work because of Ed Miliband.

It was whilst interviewing Miliband on the road in Preston last year that I encountered Graf. And as I documented at the time, that work was impressive. Hundreds of people calling hundreds more. A group built from a handful now encompassed thousands. People being turned away – that’s right, turned away – from a Labour Party meeting because there was no room. And an energy, a genuine, uplifting positive energy about campaigning for the Labour Party and for change that made me want to get out and campaign because it was right and necessary to change things, not because it was my duty as a party member.

Afterwards Miliband appeared jubilant. That familiar grin appeared lodged on his face. He looked like someone who was happy, someone who had discovered something amazing, someone who had found not only a way to win but a purpose for doing so.

I have never seen the Labour leader happier.

And since then, Graf has faded from view. Questions were raised in the press over his visa status. Suggestions were made (but never proven) that he had been “taken out” by those within the party who disapproved of his methods – despite him being a direct and public appointment of the Labour leader. Since his departure from the scene I’ve asked repeatedly when we might see Graf again. He’s on his way back, is the popular refrain. Yet his appearances have been fleeting, and the project of dragging the Labour Party forwards into a different – better- style of campaigning lies unfinished. It appears that neither Ed Miliband nor anyone else who had the power to save Graf were willing to get blood on the carpet to keep him involved. I’m sceptical that he’ll play any sort of significant role between now and the election.

After Miliband himself brought Graf in to do a job that remains undone – changing and newing the way the party organises – that’s very sad. And when I remember Miliband’s own enthusiasm for Graf’s work, it pains me. Because I share that enthusiasm. Graf’s work connecting politics with communities is needed more now in a time of rising UKIP tides and political disaffection than ever before.

I also shared Miliband’s enthusiasm for the policy review that Jon Cruddas led. Miliband was right to give such a tough task to someone who thinks deeply and strategically, not narrowly and tactically. It was a brave move – Cruddas and Miliband had never been close – but it was an astute move of a similar magnitude to Graf’s appointment.

At a time of financial constraint, it could have been politically constrained, but it wasn’t. It sought to take power from those who have wielded it ineffectively and for their own purposes and put it into the hands of the people. It sought to put trust back into our politics and relationships at the heart of our often cold and distant society. At the National Policy Forum earlier this year, the Labour Party met and agreed on a prospectus that was radical, had the potential to be popular and which united the party (a remarkable feat, when you think about the financial constraints it placed upon a future Labour government).

And yet too little of that agenda seemed to have made it into Miliband’s conference speech a few short months later. If Graf has been silenced, then Cruddas has at least been sidelined, when he should be hard at work writing the party’s manifesto. Why has he (and the One Nation politics he and Miliband espoused so recently) disappeared from view?

The democratising, devolving politics of Jon Cruddas and the bottom-up campaigning of Arnie Graf promised to build a Labour Party where power lay in the right place – in the hands of people, communities and families.

Instead, the Labour Party has, seemingly due to incorrect assertions about short-term electoral expedience, turned away from such an approach.

Instead, the lever pulling centrism that Miliband decried only months ago appears to be back in fashion. The government will fix the NHS and “someone else” will pay for it, the Minimum Wage will go up slowly (over a long period) to an arbitrary figure decided on an arbitrary (political) timetable and child benefit will be cut to pay for a crisis than neither you nor your children caused.

Miliband identified the public’s feelings of powerlessness. He understood the existential threat to our politics and our society. He had his finger on the pulse. And yet now Labour risks attempting to wield power in the same old way, whilst expecting a different outcome.

So if Ed the adviser could speak to Ed the leader today, what might he say?

I hope he’d tell Miliband to trust his own instincts. I hope he’d tell him that a victory for Labour is within his grasp, but only if he turns away from the safety first approach of recent months. And I hope he’d tell him to trust himself enough to bring back Graf, empower Cruddas, and unleash a bigger, more hopeful politics. Not just because it’s the right thing to do, and not just because it’s what has inspired some of Miliband’s best moments. But because it’s the way back to Downing Street.

And that’s where both advisers and leaders want to be.