Ed: The Milibands and the making of a Labour leader by Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre review
The younger Miliband has his doubters as Labour leader, but underestimate him at your peril
New Labour was never the most bookish of political cultures. Yet books had a curiously important role in this hyper-pragmatic era, albeit with the emphasis less on social democratic treatises than on the political book as weapon of factional destruction. The fighting phases of the Blair-Brown feud were usually triggered by the revelation of secrets, slights and betrayals to the authors of the latest political blockbuster, as press serialisations offered an almost highbrow route to aerial supremacy in the fierce contest for the news cycle.
These battles of the books changed political outcomes mostly because cunning plans backfired. Paul Routledge's hostile Brownite biography of Peter Mandelson removed its subject from the Cabinet but sacrificed the political life of Brown's press spokesman, Charlie Whelan, in the fallout. Ed Balls's extensive briefing for Robert Peston's book on Brown was intended to coincide with the arrival of a new premier in number 10, but once Blair changed his mind about when to quit, its killer quotes about the breakdown of trust threw into doubt whether Gordon would succeed at all.
If it had not been for Mandelson and Blair's publishing schedules last autumn, David Miliband would have won, not lost, Labour's knife-edge leadership contest. Mandelson and Blair's dominance of the political news just as Labour members received ballot papers fatally damaged the candidate whom they hoped to help, persuading enough undecided voters that it was time for everyone to move on.
Perhaps it is fitting that Ed Miliband, the beneficiary then, faced his first party leadership crisis as this first biography of the new! opposit ion leader reopened the fraternal wounds of his election victory over his brother David. Political journalists Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre are by instinct sympathetic to their main subject. But they take care to do a straight reporting job, painstakingly comparing the accounts of sources from all sides to unpack the history of what they call the "fratricide" of Miliband v Miliband.
They tell the tale of the rise of empathetic Ed. He is quietly understated, as he follows his brother first to Oxford, then to Westminster, and has to play second fiddle to Ed Balls in the brains trust of the Brown Treasury. Almost nobody finds a bad word to say about him. Even ex-girlfriends, the local candidate he defeats for his Doncaster seat, and Blairites who nickname him "the ambassador from planet fuck" (as the only non-sweary member of the rival gang) seem to like him. The brothers' career choice breaks entirely with the politics of their father, academic Ralph Miliband, who was famous for his deep Marxist pessimism about how Labour Parliamentary's presence led inevitably to betrayal. Yet Ed believes his moderate radicalism keeps faith with the left's values.
Personal charm helps him clinch the party leadership too. Front-runners have a massive advantage in an electoral college system that gives as much power to 250 MPs as to 170,000 party members. David Miliband ran a classic "inevitability" campaign, telling career politicians that their career prospects depended on backing the winner. Yet Ed Miliband did much more to pursue every MP one-to-one in the Commons' bars and tearooms, winning the whole leadership election by the equivalent of six second preferences from MPs. (Ed flops badly with influential backbencher Jon Cruddas, though, who can't forgive him for finding the gritty British film Fish Tank too depressing to watch.)
The empathy fails with his sibling. Neither Miliband anticipates the emotional fallout of campaigning against each other: David, because he didn't take his younge! r brothe r's candidacy seriously enough until too late; Ed, because he would have been happy to have served under his brother, so he failed to anticipate how much harder it could prove for David to lose. Ed says he "felt an understandably strange mixture of euphoria for himself and disappointment for his brother" upon being told he had won. The book argues that those emotions have yet to be reconciled.
Yet the "fratricide" charge that Hasan and Macintyre level is unfair. This was an election for a vacancy, not a leadership coup. Everybody in Westminster now says the lesson of the Brown assumption of power in 2007 is that elections are healthier than coronations. Curiously, it is often those who argue that a Blair-Brown contest would have proved healthy in 1994 who resent Ed Miliband standing in 2010.
Put aside primogeniture: both brothers had to decide whether to stand against a sibling. Informed Labour observers had thought Ed Miliband had a decent chance of being the next leader ever since David Miliband's hesistant semi-putsch against Gordon Brown fizzled out in 2008.
The Labour leadership contest symbolised the narrowness of the political class, with our enormously effective affirmative action schemes for special advisers. But Miliband v Miliband can also be seen as a wider British story of mobility and hope, as the sons of refugees from Nazi Europe rose to the top at Westminster. Although the psychological scars of a hard-fought democratic election will take a while to fully heal, they are not matters of life and death. David, defeated, has maintained a public dignity, albeit not helped by chatter from anonymous "friends" in the press.
That Ed sometimes feels like an in-depth Sunday magazine profile stretched to book length is reinforced by the publisher including reports and pictures of Ed's wedding to Justine Thornton less than a month ago. The pacy reportage can squeeze ou! t analyt ical perspective. Forensic scrutiny is applied to the question of whether Ed decided to run for leader on the Tuesday or the Wednesday after the general election, perhaps leaving a 24-hour gap before he went to tell his brother. The authors skim over how his political thinking has evolved over six years in Parliament, particularly the way that Ed's front-seat view of the unhappy Brown premiership persuaded him to abandon the era of tactical triangulation and the one-more-heave politics of what he calls "New Labour nostalgia".
Ultimately, Ed ran because he disagreed with his brother over the politics of Labour's defeat and how to win next time. The book doesn't really dig into this, or try to predict what direction Ed will take his party in. Still, it is the party leader's job, not his biographers', to tell us that.
Ed Miliband's chances of making a second edition necessary by becoming prime minister are much underestimated. Michael Ashcroft's recent assessment, after an enormous polling exercise, that Ed "could get close to 40% [of the vote] without needing to get out of bed" should have sent shudders through Downing Street. The steady rise of empathetic Ed may have a good deal further to go.
Sunder Katwala is general secretary of the Fabian Society.
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