My Husband, My Hero
Hugo Rifkind writing in The Times has an amusing take on Ed Miliband's efforts to spin his way of of trouble when it comes to his leadership of the Labour Party.
As Hugo points out during the 2010 Labour leadership contest, the Ed Miliband camp was perfectly happy to portray David Miliband as an out of touch policy wonk with claims that "Ed speaks human", but now that the boot is on the other foot Team Ed is not so keen.
And remember that David Miliband won a big majority of votes from individual Labour party members since Ed only 'beat' his older brother with the help of votes from trade union activists, overturning the wishes of Labour's grassroots membership.
So now the wife (Justine) is being wheeled out in a sign of desperation, if not panic although we have been here before, as I recall the toe-curlingly awful moment in 2009 when Sarah Brown 'introduced' Gordon Brown to the Labour Party conference, describing him as 'my husband, my hero' if I remember her words correctly.
Substance not spin, right enough.
It’s not how you look, Ed. It’s how you think
By Hugo Rifkind - The Times
The Labour leader claims that image is his only problem. But that’s the last desperate ploy of the failing politician
‘Ed speaks human.” Now that should have set the alarm bells ringing. It was on badges. We’ll come back to them. “Ed speaks human.” Just think about it.
It was 2010 and Her Majesty’s opposition was locked into a leadership battle. Chiefly it was supposed to be a showdown between the guy everybody thought should win but was cripplingly bad at holding bananas, and that other guy nobody liked, who had hair like Hitler.
There were other contenders too, but they weren’t supposed to be taken seriously. One of them was that man you don’t remember. Remember? No. Another — and truly, kids, I swear this did happen — was Diane Abbott. Then there was this other bloke. He had a surname like one favourite and a first name like the other favourite. A Miliband who could hold bananas. An Ed without hair that looked as if it wished to rule for 1,000 years. And gradually people began to suggest that he could be the answer.
They were right, these people, about the hair. But my God, could they have been any more wrong about the banana? Some must have known, but pretended not to. Even with the badges. At the party conference that year they were everywhere. “Ed speaks human,” they said. Because that’s just how low the bar was. “Okay, so he’s not anactual human,” people must have been saying to each other, “for this is the Labour party after three years of Gordon Brown and we’re all out of those. But hey, at least he speaks it! Maybe he did that Rosetta stone course! With the tapes!”
Except he didn’t, did he? That’s the great irony. Four years on, we now know this. Not even as a second language. First they denied his geekishness, then they tried to boast about it. Now they’re apologising for it. “I am not from central casting,” the man who wants to be our next prime minister declared in a well-trailed speech to the Royal Institute of British Architects last week. “You can find people who are more square-jawed, more chiselled, look less like Wallace. You could probably even find people who look better eating a bacon sandwich. If you want the politician from central casting, it’s just not me, it’s the other guy.”
Which other guy, though? Not his brother, clearly. His sandwich would have been a disaster. Nor even David Cameron, because a savvy central casting would actually be far more likely to put him up for one of those evil Errol Flynn-type roles where you wear a pencil-thin moustache and a pair of tights, and have to demand droit du seigneur off scrofulous peasants from atop a horse. So who, then? Who is this dream, insincere, image-led, substance-free politician from whom Ed is now so keen to differentiate himself?
The truth is, there isn’t one. Politicians, you see, have two obvious strategies when they find themselves in true, plummeting, free-falling desperation. Right now, Ed Miliband is doing both. One is to wheel out the spouse — in his case, Justine Thornton, a stylish and attractive lawyer — the theory being that a male politician’s wife sees something special in him (you’d hope) and if she bangs on about it enough, the electorate might see it too. Commentary about this has two inevitable features. First, it uses the phrase “secret weapon”. Second, it ignores the fact that this strategy has never, ever worked. John Major tried it, IDS tried it, Michael Howard tried it, Gordon Brown tried it. They all lost. Mr Cameron shows off about his wife, but has never yet relied upon her. One day he will and you will know that he is doomed.
The other strategy is to conceptualise a split between image and substance and declare that only the former is failing. That never works either. A great many right-wing Tories to this day truly believe that the only thing that held them back in the post-1997 doldrums was that they had the wrong succession of lacklustre bald men in charge and that new Labour was better at choosing pop songs. In truth, that the Tories were led by unappealing people during that period was the inevitable consequence of their being a party that thought unappealing things.
The Blair government did image, yes, but it was also on a reforming crusade. Mr Cameron understands spin, but has politics worth spinning. Likewise, there has never truly been an also-ran political party that would have thrived if only its spokesman had told better jokes. It’s a myth that you can separate these things. Veterans of party conferences often remark that you can tell which side is in the ascendancy by how much you’d want to sleep with the wonks and minions. Connect with the nation and charisma comes as part of the package.
This is Ed Miliband’s problem. Certainly his visions of One Nation Britain reborn and of a classless Germanification of the British workforce are pretty damn clever. Likewise his notion of “predistribution”, although it takes me 12 minutes to understand it again each time I remember about it, and it’s always gone within an afternoon. He’s also undeniably deft at spotting stuff that matters, such as the rampagings of the tabloid press or the excesses of capitalism.
It’s a terrible mistake, though, to believe that a better communicator could take identical ideas and use them to seduce the mainstream. Mr Miliband gives us seeds, not finished products. He’d be an exciting think-tank, or maybe even an inspirational newspaper columnist. And that’s not enough. If he really did speak human — or was it — then the ideas themselves would be more human, too. But he doesn’t. So they aren’t.
The Labour leader claims that image is his only problem. But that’s the last desperate ploy of the failing politician
‘Ed speaks human.” Now that should have set the alarm bells ringing. It was on badges. We’ll come back to them. “Ed speaks human.” Just think about it.
It was 2010 and Her Majesty’s opposition was locked into a leadership battle. Chiefly it was supposed to be a showdown between the guy everybody thought should win but was cripplingly bad at holding bananas, and that other guy nobody liked, who had hair like Hitler.
There were other contenders too, but they weren’t supposed to be taken seriously. One of them was that man you don’t remember. Remember? No. Another — and truly, kids, I swear this did happen — was Diane Abbott. Then there was this other bloke. He had a surname like one favourite and a first name like the other favourite. A Miliband who could hold bananas. An Ed without hair that looked as if it wished to rule for 1,000 years. And gradually people began to suggest that he could be the answer.
They were right, these people, about the hair. But my God, could they have been any more wrong about the banana? Some must have known, but pretended not to. Even with the badges. At the party conference that year they were everywhere. “Ed speaks human,” they said. Because that’s just how low the bar was. “Okay, so he’s not anactual human,” people must have been saying to each other, “for this is the Labour party after three years of Gordon Brown and we’re all out of those. But hey, at least he speaks it! Maybe he did that Rosetta stone course! With the tapes!”
Except he didn’t, did he? That’s the great irony. Four years on, we now know this. Not even as a second language. First they denied his geekishness, then they tried to boast about it. Now they’re apologising for it. “I am not from central casting,” the man who wants to be our next prime minister declared in a well-trailed speech to the Royal Institute of British Architects last week. “You can find people who are more square-jawed, more chiselled, look less like Wallace. You could probably even find people who look better eating a bacon sandwich. If you want the politician from central casting, it’s just not me, it’s the other guy.”
Which other guy, though? Not his brother, clearly. His sandwich would have been a disaster. Nor even David Cameron, because a savvy central casting would actually be far more likely to put him up for one of those evil Errol Flynn-type roles where you wear a pencil-thin moustache and a pair of tights, and have to demand droit du seigneur off scrofulous peasants from atop a horse. So who, then? Who is this dream, insincere, image-led, substance-free politician from whom Ed is now so keen to differentiate himself?
The truth is, there isn’t one. Politicians, you see, have two obvious strategies when they find themselves in true, plummeting, free-falling desperation. Right now, Ed Miliband is doing both. One is to wheel out the spouse — in his case, Justine Thornton, a stylish and attractive lawyer — the theory being that a male politician’s wife sees something special in him (you’d hope) and if she bangs on about it enough, the electorate might see it too. Commentary about this has two inevitable features. First, it uses the phrase “secret weapon”. Second, it ignores the fact that this strategy has never, ever worked. John Major tried it, IDS tried it, Michael Howard tried it, Gordon Brown tried it. They all lost. Mr Cameron shows off about his wife, but has never yet relied upon her. One day he will and you will know that he is doomed.
The other strategy is to conceptualise a split between image and substance and declare that only the former is failing. That never works either. A great many right-wing Tories to this day truly believe that the only thing that held them back in the post-1997 doldrums was that they had the wrong succession of lacklustre bald men in charge and that new Labour was better at choosing pop songs. In truth, that the Tories were led by unappealing people during that period was the inevitable consequence of their being a party that thought unappealing things.
The Blair government did image, yes, but it was also on a reforming crusade. Mr Cameron understands spin, but has politics worth spinning. Likewise, there has never truly been an also-ran political party that would have thrived if only its spokesman had told better jokes. It’s a myth that you can separate these things. Veterans of party conferences often remark that you can tell which side is in the ascendancy by how much you’d want to sleep with the wonks and minions. Connect with the nation and charisma comes as part of the package.
This is Ed Miliband’s problem. Certainly his visions of One Nation Britain reborn and of a classless Germanification of the British workforce are pretty damn clever. Likewise his notion of “predistribution”, although it takes me 12 minutes to understand it again each time I remember about it, and it’s always gone within an afternoon. He’s also undeniably deft at spotting stuff that matters, such as the rampagings of the tabloid press or the excesses of capitalism.
It’s a terrible mistake, though, to believe that a better communicator could take identical ideas and use them to seduce the mainstream. Mr Miliband gives us seeds, not finished products. He’d be an exciting think-tank, or maybe even an inspirational newspaper columnist. And that’s not enough. If he really did speak human — or was it — then the ideas themselves would be more human, too. But he doesn’t. So they aren’t.
