The revelation that Paul Greengrass, the director of The Bourne Supremacy, and who co-authored with Peter Wright the bug-and-tell expose of the UK's secret services, Spycatcher, helped Ed Miliband prepare for his public appearances, provides too many potential threads for any blogger on this week's Labour conference to ignore. The most obvious one is that Miliband, like the fictitious Jason Bourne, is pictured looking stunned and confused and, frankly - as it was rather and tactlessly put to him on BBC Radio 4's Today programme - somewhat "weird", and seemingly having no knowledge of the sinister conspiracies of which he was a part. But no writer of political thrillers would have dared to have its main character – who is usually a figure designed to engender interest and even empathy by the reader and viewer - committing fratricide. The elephant in the room – in fact the trunk at least was visible one or two occasions at the conference, held in a glorious looking sun-drenched Liverpool – was that the party had chosen the wrong brother and Ed was just not up to the job.
To say that personalities do not matter in politics is ridiculous. Looking good on television has been essential for any political leader since at least the early 1960s and being able to engender at least grudging respect, even if you disagree with their policies, is equally important. The Mail on Sunday – admittedly not a newspaper generally helpful to the Labour cause – commissioned a poll which asked the public to characterise the main party leaders through a variety of prisms and circumstances. In fact, I think this can be narrowed down to two main questions: the foxhole and the neighbour test.
The first is the person who you would like to be beside you, with the enemy perhaps a few hundred yards away; you're running out of rations and the bullets are whizzing over your head. In the circumstances you'd want somebody tough, ruthless, decisive and who, if you are wounded or temporarily knocked out, would do their very best to drag you to safety, even at the cost of their own life.
The neighbour test is who you would like living next door to you; who could be relied on to water your roses whilst you're away, would alert you if they saw water or smoke emitting from your home, and with whom you could imagine spending a pleasant evening, and to whom you would trust with your secrets and problems – and receive sage advice.
Few political leaders passed both these tests. Churchill and Thatcher, for instance, would both easily pass the foxhole test, but Thatcher would be scolding about you not having done the weeding, or keeping up with the paintwork; Churchill would be to self- absorbed and absent-minded. Harold Wilson and John Major both pass the 'good neighbour test' but I would think I was doomed if I was in the foxhole with them. Of the leading Labour figures of the last half-century or so, Denis Healey and Barbara Castle both pass both tests, as does Jim Callaghan, the only one of that trio to make it to number 10 and the only person in the 20th century to hold all four big offices of state – Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer as well as PM, and, as it happens, the only Prime Minister I have sat down for a one-to-one lengthy interview.
Ed Miliband fails both miserably. I'm sure he would say all the right, soothing things in that foxhole just before the 'fun' started, but would be would be useless under fire and indeed, as he was almost forced to concede by the BBC's political editor Nick Robinson, he's never had to fight for anything in his life. Paradoxically, though, he has done one thing which, you might argue, demonstrates the necessary political ruthlessness needed in a Prime Minister – the decision to run against his brother in the Labour leadership last year. But although that was unquestionably a tough thing to do it was also hugely disloyal and, in my view, utterly wrong. And I reckon most British people who have older brothers will think the same. I just cannot imagine that if my brother and I were both political figures – or in any other line - that I would work to stop him getting to the top by putting myself into the frame. Indeed, I would do everything I could to help him to get there. To do otherwise goes against something quite atavistic and elementary. Maybe it's also paternalistic and reactionary but that's what I feel. I just wouldn't trust a man who would do that.
I couldn't see him as an ideal neighbour either; he neither has the kind of 'laddish' approach to life that I can enjoy, and I'm sure he'd be scolding me from not recycling more. Like many on the Left, he says all the right things – he can talk the talk – but his actions betray a very selfish agenda. I suppose you have to have a supposedly Marxist father to have an arrangement where you can inherit property and avoid tax, where dad's connections and name means you get an internship with Tony Benn to set you off on your political career , and, naturally, a 'career' that never actually includes what we might call a proper job, to have complete ignorance of the everyday concerns, aspirations and attitudes of your fellow countrymen.
I do have – full disclosure time! – a particular beef with Miliband Jr over his ministerial job in the last government as Secretary of State for (well, presumably AGAINST!) Climate Change, when he compared those who objected to wind turbines as being socially irresponsible, comparable with someone not wearing a seatbelt or ignoring a pedestrian waiting at a zebra crossing. I fiercely object to the turbines, bearing in mind their enormous cost, inefficiency and most of all their blight on what's left of our countryside. It is typical that Miliband would support something as modish and voguish as those. Naturally, he would throw them himself into the climate change cause, denounce those who were somewhat sceptical about the evidence and the actions proposed by government and the huge cost to the taxpayer as being heartless and irresponsible; unmoved by the flight of drowning polar bears or the melting ice cap on Everest.
For the record, let me make it clear that I do think that the climate is changing and that man's activities have an effect on it – it would be astonishing if it did not. What I cannot go along with though is the idea that there is a direct and precise connection between, say a certain tonnage of methane or carbon dioxide and a change in global temperatures. The Earth is just too complicated a biosphere for this to be the case and there are many other factors, such as sunspots and volcanoes, which have a habit of throwing all the predictions out of the window. And anyone who thinks that the 'scientific community' has more integrity than the supposedly more flaky academics and practitioners in the arts and humanities is naive in the extreme. Now, I have no scientific training beyond school level and neither does Miliband, but I do know that scientists have an agenda that is driven as much by the need for the next research grant, the promotion of a book and career matters generally, than it is by dispassionate observation and conclusions. (More on the BBC's coverage of the Climate Change issue, as well as EU and much more in my new book! Did I mention….? Everything from Baudrillard to penis-size discussed within its covers).
What drives me even more bonkers though is the smugness and condescension of the Green party, a spokesman for which I once heard scolding a man who wanted to fly off with his family to have a bit of sunshine; the first time he'd ever been able to do so. He should, said the Green, think first about the damage that flight was doing to the Earth and should holiday at home. By this time I was screaming at the TV: "and where did you go on your gap 'yar'? Presumably you took the train to, say Kirkby down the road from here, where there is lots of poverty and social projects in need of doing, rather than, say, off to work with indigenous tribes in South America, paid for by daddy's trust fund." Grr, grr, etc.
The Miliband of course would never criticise the NHS, because all the focus groups – and true enough, the applause in Liverpool – will tell him that this state health monolith is our new religion and that all who work in it are angels and heroes. Again, this view does ignore the evidence, including from some of those who work in the health service, with several reports in the last few months saying that there is indeed much wrong with the service and the attitude of many of its employees. For all its achievements and its plus points – and there are many – you are, for example, many more times as likely to die from certain cancers in particular in Britain that you are in the (Boo! Hiss!) U.S. system and other comparable first-world countries. Even in largely social democratic Western Europe, health is usually provided by competing social insurance groups, trade unions, mutual societies and the like. But any suggestion of even a tentative move in this direction provokes screams from the "four legs good, two legs bad" brigade of 'privatisation!' I realise, that despite all the evidence, I'm in a minority position here and as a democrat I have to wearily accept that the British people will never countenance any real change in the system, even though it would manifestly lead to much better life expectancy and an all-round better service. But a political leader who wants to be a weather changer, not just a manager, has to take political risks and Miliband never will. He is constrained by the knowledge that general elections are decided by a relatively small number of uncommitted voters in a minority of marginal seats. The swing voters must be modified, flattered, smothered with vanilla-flavoured speeches and photo opportunities.
But he just doesn't say anything of any interest and his scheme keynote speech to the conference was truly dreadful at every level, in my view. The most astonishing part was the line: "I am not Tony Blair", which was greeted by some boos. Michael Portillo said on the BBC's late-night TV political gab-fest This Week, you just cannot imagine what was going through his and his speechwriters' minds when they put that line in, because there is just no way it can have a good reaction. If the audience approves the line, it demonstrates how much they disliked their most electorally successful leader and are effectively disowning the decade when he, and the party, was in power. If it was greeted – as it was – by boos, that is capable of being read both ways, neither them helpful to Labour, showing there is even more antagonism towards Blair, or that they are sorry that he isn't Blair! And silence would be just embarrassing. Quite extraordinary when you think this speech must have been written by supposedly very bright people who are politically aware and are being paid to sniff out all the fault-lines of the speech. And it demonstrates at the very least a lack of competence on his part, to add to charges above.
Of course, I could be proved wrong; I might have predicted, six months in advance, the last election results within a seat (he modestly reminds his readers!), but if the coalition survives the course – and that is quite a big 'if' in my opinion – we have some 3 1/2 years to the next election. Please feel free to remind me of this if indeed Miliband sweeps to power on a landslide, provided by a grateful and adoring nation. It's possible: governments tend to lose elections, rather than oppositions wining them, so it will largely depend on how the ConDem government is viewed at the time. But as it stands I would say he is doomed to join Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock and (although of course death took him before he stood an electoral test) John Smith in the post-Callaghan pantheon of Labour leaders who never made it to Number 10. I think it is even likely that the next Labour Prime Minister is not even in the House of Commons at present. As with Blair, who wasn't elected until after Callaghan's defeat, or Cameron - first elected more than a decade after Thatcher left office - they may need someone who is not tainted by past failures and the fissures of the party in government; who can indeed be Bourne again.
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