Hunt for Ed Stone

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The Guardian's Marina Hyde must be a member of the Labour Party (or a member of an affiliated trade union) if she has a vote in Labour's leadership election, but she is going to support whichever candidate deals with the now infamous 'Ed Stone' unveiled by Ed Miliband during the general election campaign. 

Come on Labour, the people need closure. Give us that bloody Edstone



By Marina Hyde - The Guardian

The first candidate big enough to deal with the monstrous campaign-trail cock-up of the manifesto monolith will get my vote 
Ed Miliband unveiling Labour's pledges carved on a stone plinth while campaigning in Hastings. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

Look, I don’t want to come across as too principled here, but I think I’d vote for any of the Labour leadership candidates who told me the truth about what happened to the Edstone. Maybe Chuka Umunna wanted to break the omertà – maybe they got to him. But none of us need the services of the renowned symbologist Robert Langdon to tell us that the stone has been invested with dark and troubling powers. Why else is its fate the most closely guarded secret since Labour’s economic policy?

To the list of Things Labour Still Doesn’t Get, may I add Britain’s need to know what happened to the Edstone? I would place this at the top of the aforementioned list of things, and if that results in me being told that my priorities are out of whack by a party whose own bearings were about 500 nautical miles off course, then I think I can make my peace with that. I just can’t make my peace with the not knowing.

I don’t need to see a video of Andy Burnham walking barefoot through its gravelled remains, maybe in three-quarter-length trousers while singing The Way We Were; nor do I require footage of Yvette Cooper kneeling on a sandy beach out of which the ruined top of the Edstone is protruding, wailing “God damn you all to hell!” while her helpmeet, Ed Balls, holds the reins of their horse. I’ve got the internet for all that.

What I don’t have is answers from a party that has spent the past week robotically assuring me: “We need to have an open and honest discussion.” OK. Item one: where’s your bloody stone?

Where is it – your Milistone, your EdHenge, your policy cenotaph (© Simon Blackwell)? Is it, as some claim, still intact – but in a high-security hiding place? Or is it, as others insist, already destroyed? We know it was a tombstone – was it given a funeral? Was it buried at sea like Osama bin Laden, in order that its final resting place not become a place of pilgrimage for political ironists? According to a new account – by the veteran US journalist Seymour Hersh, of course – Osama himself was not buried at sea, but used for target practice by some of the Seal team, then scattered in various pieces over the Hindu Kush. Perhaps this was the fate of the Edstone, but on the South Downs instead.

Clearly, I wonder too much about the Edstone. I’ve considered the possibility that this is a classic displacement activity, preferable to thinking too about, say, the fact that the new justice secretary has no legal background, has written in support of bringing back hanging, declared that the Stephen Lawrence inquiry had a “whiff of Salem” about it, and insisted there should be no inquiry into any cover-up of paedophile politicians at Westminster.

But my Edstone obsession is something else as well: it’s the psychological pull of unfinished business. You can’t move in modern politics for hearing about narratives, mostly from the people who imagine they’re involved in the construction of them. If Labour party members understand that – they certainly bang on about it enough – then it ought not to be beyond their wit to see that you can’t just unveil an eight-foot limestone manifesto monolith and imagine it can die offstage without comment. That stone stole the show. Its public needs to know how it ended. Call it closure; call it what you like. Just call me from an untraceable number and tell me what happened to it.

On some things we can speculate with a degree of certainty. In the days – hours? – after the election, a kill order would have had to go out. Clearly, it must have been recycled in some way. You can’t just drive it out to the weeds and bury it in a shallow grave. Discussions would have been had about what would happen if – when? – people found out what they’d done.

And make no mistake, some reporter will find out eventually. Someone will be the Indiana Jones of the Edstone, perhaps reaching back for their notebook as the garage door on a Hastings gravel merchant comes closing down. And I will love them for it. We must hope they have not been diverted by events – none of us wants to live in a world where Harrison Ford’s boss rings him up and tells him he’s being pulled off the Ark of the Covenant quest and put on to a tip they’ve got about one of Chuka Umunna’s friends in Ibiza.

As for the Edstone’s precise fate, that may be the best bit of the tale. There is something marvellous about transformational stories involving unwanted inanimate objects. At Madame Tussauds, changes in popularity mean the collection is always mutating, and some dummies go the way of all wax. An employee once told me that bits of William Hague ended up in Jonny Wilkinson. (Leave that one – it’s not worth it.) The top layer of the M6 toll road contains 2.5m pulped Mills & Boon novels. Ever since I discovered that another use for remaindered books is to be made into the artificial snow used in filming, I have been unable to watch things like the Christmas episode of Downton Abbey without wondering happily whether the cast’s faces are being gently kissed by flakes of, for instance, Ashley Cole’s critically misunderstood autobiography. Do look at dear Lady Mary, hand outstretched in wonderment to touch the softly fluttering fragments of the bit where Ashley nearly drives his Aston Martin off the North Circular while he’s screaming at his agent about Arsenal’s offer to him being £5,000 a week short. Christmas makes children of us all, doesn’t it?

Anyhow, if the Edstone is living a new life as a driveway on the south coast, we need to know about it. There is humanity in that there stone – or rather, in a wry disclosure of what has happened to it. As things stand, it’s just another piece of unfinished business that Labour simply can’t bear to deal with. (Keepers of records will know that tally now also includes two elections.)

So I’m only half-joking when I say the person who is most able to deal with this hilarious cock-up by, you know, even talking about it – God, maybe even risking an actual joke about it – is the most human and relatable candidate on offer, and consequently the best choice to lead the party. Take ownership, contenders – or stonership, if you prefer.

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