"Give me a break"
Boris Johnson, the London Mayor, does an effective job of mocking Ed Miliband's vacuous speech about the need for politics to inject more substance and rely less spin and image.
To be expected from a political opponent for sure, but Boris shows he can speak a bit of 'Franglais' as well as Latin with his memorable line: "donned moi un break".
Ed Miliband is right that policies, not image, are what counts, but his ideas add up to nothing
By Boris Johnson - The Telegraph
By ’eck Wallace, is that it? Is that the best you can do? A few days ago, the Labour leader gave a widely publicised speech in which he lamented the modern political obsession with image rather than substance. It was all so wrong and annoying, he said. People focused on how you looked when you were eating a bacon butty or whether you bore a resemblance to a Plasticine animated character – when what the public wanted, said Ed Miliband, was ideas; first, last, always – ideas, policies, programmes and hard-edged initiatives.
Now you may think that a little bit rich coming from a guy who has just advertised for yet another “broadcast officer” on £80,000 a year, and who is apparently talking to professors of autism about how he can show more empathy when in public, but never mind. He is surely right.
It doesn’t matter, if you are a politician, whether you approach a bacon sarnie with the daintiness of Barbara Cartland or the carnivorous savagery of Luis Suárez. It doesn’t matter whether you look like Elle Macpherson or Jabba the Hutt – what counts is whether you have good, big ideas to tackle the many problems of a vast and mature Western democracy such as Britain.
So we were all naturally on tenterhooks when Miliband went on The Andrew Marr Show. We had heard the drum roll – now for the ideas! The substance! The gristly intellectual substrate beneath all this irritating media froth that he so rightly deplored. Perhaps he was going to explain why Marx had got some things right; perhaps we were going to get a definition of Ed Miliband’s baffling concept of “predistribution”, which seems to mean taking away people’s money before they have even earned it.
What did we get instead? Holy Wensleydale cheese, folks – the big new policy from Miliband is that he is going to work with Speaker Bercow to have a new kind of meet-the-public question time. Donnez moi un break. Welcome to the 21st century, Mili. If you bothered to consult this new internet thingy, you would find that this sort of event has been happening for some time.
Even in the governance of London, the public question time is standard stuff. The London Mayor and Assembly members are constantly to be found in school gyms and church halls, month in and month out, inflicting our opinions on innocent members of the public who have wandered in and stuck up their hand. If anything, people need some measure of protection from the unremitting levels of interaction that we want to provide.
But I needed to be fair to Ed – we went to the same school, after all – and so I checked that this was really the best he could do. So unlike 99.9 per cent of the population, I have gone back to the text of his great let’s-have-ideas-not-spin speech. I have read every word. I have sieved it and strained it for the smallest crouton of substance, anything at all that you could get your teeth into. Have a look yourself: it’s there online.
It is not a rich minestrone of policies. It is a watery and flavourless consommé of nothingness. There is absolutely nothing that corresponds to an idea that is either new or big; just a couple of paragraphs in which he makes a passing allusion to some of his small, old, bad ideas – before he gets back to the subject that he thinks is really important, viz his so-called image problem, the size of his teeth, etc etc.
In so far as he is willing to discuss policy at all, he reminds us in a few short and verbless phrases that he wants to bash the banks with a new levy – a mindless solution to the problems of financial sector irresponsibility, which will damage one of the strongest bits of the economy. He wants to put up taxes for the rich – which might gratify the vindictiveness of the Labour Left, but which will achieve nothing of economic value for this country; quite the reverse. He wants to poke the energy companies in the eye – a measure that will not exactly help them build the power stations we desperately need. And he wants to give over-mighty press barons a kicking, you know, er, like his ludicrous apology for posing with a copy of the Sun, a paper read by millions of people including a great many Labour voters… and that’s it.
These are the things he has now been saying for years, and it is this approach that has left him with the worst ratings of any Labour leader since Michael Foot.
Where are the detailed plans to tackle educational inequality, to reform welfare, to give the country the homes it needs, to provide the infrastructure for Britain to compete? They are being driven forward by the Conservative-led coalition. Ask yourself: what concrete policies is Ed Miliband offering – large or small – that will help encourage the spirit of enterprise in this country, so that we can create the wealth to pay for the poorest and neediest?
How can you take this country forward if you are offering nothing but a handful of knee-jerk attacks on businesses of all kinds? The answer is that you can’t.
Ed Miliband’s problem is not so much that he looks like Wallace. He should look at the films of the great Nick Park to see what has gone wrong. As soon as he was elected leader of the Labour party, he woke up, pressed for assistance on his special gizmo, and then he was shot through a hatch in the floor into a sinister pair of automatic steel leggings that are moving him irresistibly away from Blairism and in a direction of Leftist irrelevance. He hasn’t got the wrong face – he’s wearing the wrong trousers! And who is the blinking-eyed penguin who is controlling him? It’s Len McCluskey and the unions, of course.
Ed Miliband is absolutely right to say that politics should be about ideas, and he is right to say that these should be more important than image. But the awful fact – confirmed by this speech – is that, frankly, Miliband’s image and photo-opportunities are the best things he has in his political programme.
