Miliband the elder is Labour’s best chance
POLITICAL EDITOR
THERE are few things duller than a Labour leadership contest. The five rivals have been travelling the length and breadth of the country, delivering exactly the same stump speech at a never-ending series of hustings. It’s a running joke among the contenders that they know each other’s scripts off by heart, not just their own. Ed Miliband, the insurgent that took on heir apparent and elder brother David, does a particularly good job of mimicking the others.
Andy Burnham, the self-styled working class candidate, normally tries to rouse the crowd with a heart-felt repudiation of Tony Blair’s New Labour, that election-winning machine that kept the party in power for 13 years, but which the party hates so much. “If you’re not New Labour, or Next Labour, but Our Labour – be part of my campaign,” he says.
This statement sums up everything wrong with the leadership contest, which has descended into an orgy of navel-gazing that interests no-one outside the Labour party. In fact, “Next Labour” – or Newer Labour – is the best chance the party has of seizing power if the coalition does indeed split.
Instead, nearly all the candidates are focusing on Our Labour (read Their Labour), on capturing the hearts and minds of core voters in the party’s heartlands. They would do well to remember it wasn’t a collapse in the core vote that lost Labour the last election: its share of the vote actually went up in Scotland; it fought hard against a Tory incursion into the North ; and it stopped inner London turning blue.
No, Labour lost almost a hundred seats because it failed to win in the South East, East Anglia and the South West, areas that are home to aspirational middle-class voters who work in the private sector and read the Daily Mail. The problem was all too apparent at a drinks reception for Labour bigwigs and journalists earlier this week. Ed Miliband (the only contender who turned up) surrounded himself with hacks from the New Statesman and Tribune, lecturing them in wonkish language that sounded like nonsense to other guests; journalists from the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Sun were left well alone (most went home early, long before the warm white wine ran out).
If any of the candidates gets Labour’s need to reconnect with the middle class majority, it is David Miliband. He alone understands how far to the left the party has shifted since the departure of Blair, a man who said he didn’t want David Beckham to earn less money – and meant it, who shared Michael Gove’s zeal for education reform and Iain Duncan Smith’s ambition to shrink the welfare state. I suspect that when the second preference votes are counted, it is younger brother Ed who could emerge victorious. That would make an early exit from the wilderness much less likely.