Brothers in Arms
Rod Liddle's article in the Sunday Times yesterday was a rather vituperative - but still funny - piece on the battle that is underway over the future direction of the Labour party.
Ultimately, he concludes that it makes little, if any, difference - over which side claims victory in the end.
But along the way Liddle does manage to highlight the madness of contemporary politics - and bring what's going on behind the scenes vividly to life.
Reminds me of the good old days when the country was told - on a dialy basis sometimes - that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were really great friends.
With brotherly love like that, Ed, who needs assassins?
I hope you can appreciate the hurt of David Miliband, now that his constructive suggestions for helping Labour win the next general election have been so egregiously misinterpreted.
He is apparently seething, upset and bewildered — much as we all are — that his article in a low-circulation, left-wing periodical was taken as an attack on his brother, Ed.
After all, the piece was headlined “Time to rethink — not reassure”, which is anodyne enough.
There is absolutely no evidence that David suggested to the New Statesman the alternative headline “Let’s get rid of this floundering, adenoidal halfwit NOW”, or that these words were scrawled in Biro at the end of his submission but were removed by the sub-editors.
The words printed were meant in a manner that was both kindly and constructive (it is only mischief-makers in the media who could interpret them otherwise). Which is why David chose to publish them in the week in which the tumbrils were rolling quite quickly towards Smith Square, with the party at its lowest ebb in the polls since that time Michael Foot mistakenly thought the Cenotaph service was actually a tramps’n’ tarts fancy dress party (bring a bottle).
With Ed at his most vulnerable, and the knives being sharpened, David merely sought to offer a helping hand by pointing out how staggeringly useless his brother has been, what with estranging the entire country, annoying the industrialists, hiding behind an outdated and discredited class war rhetoric and, all in all, being about as likely to win the next general election as a pig’s bladder on a stick. And for this, for this, he is pilloried and thought disloyal, in both a party and familial sense.
Much has been made of the fact that, throughout the piece, David refers to his brother as a sort of disembodied, ectoplasmic entity called “Ed Miliband” — rather than “Ed” or “My Bro” or even — light-heartedly, mind you — “that treacherous bastard who, with the unions, robbed me of my inheritance and stitched me up like a kipper”. But these high-octane, north London, pseudo-lefty intellectuals are a strange bunch and it is quite possible that David referred to his brother in this manner all the way through childhood — perhaps thinking “Ed” too familiar a term for someone with whom he was not greatly acquainted or overly enamoured.
Various “friends” of David, or maybe just one, have pointed out that while he was hurt by the manner of his leadership election defeat to Ed — of course he was, who wouldn’t be hurt — he bears his sibling not a scintilla of ill will and “hopes he will succeed”. Which was why he wrote the piece “Time to rethink, not to reassure”.
Indeed, in the article, David took great care to praise this “Ed Miliband” person, reserving his scorn only for everyone who had ever had anything to do with him, philosophically, socially, politically. In particular, he stuck the boot — either directly or by implication — into Roy Hattersley and Neil Kinnock.
It was Kinnock, of course, who famously commented on Ed’s victory: “We’ve got our party back!” This stuck in David’s craw, this superannuated Welsh windbag exulting in the final defeat of new Labourism. It probably stuck in David’s craw even more that so many Labour party members and supporters felt exactly the same, even if it did not include many of those in the House of Lords.
And then there’s that blubbery, spittle-flecked old northerner Hattersley, with his “central nation state” delusions — a constant thorn in the side of new Labour for year after year, a dinosaur from the right of the party suddenly reinvented, in his dotage, as a voice of conscience from the left. How David dislikes him. Dislikes him, but not Ed, of course. I’m sure Ed understands this perfectly well, is able to make the distinction and knows that no ill will was meant.
David thinks Ed is resuscitating old Labour, whereas Ed believes David wishes to resuscitate new Labour; two corpses, both of which smell pretty much the same.
