Ed Miliband and Forrest Gump

The Mail's political sketch writer, Quentin Letts, does an effective hatchet job here on Ed Miliband's big speech to the Labour party conference which went down like a lead balloon to all but the party faithful, apparently, and even they had to be roused out of their apathy by some official 'helpers' working the hall.  

Now I don't normally go for this 'playing the man' style of criticism, but having listened to Ed's last speech before the 2015 general election, I have to agree it was dreadful, full of strange anecdotes about whom he had met in his local park, which meant that Ed came across more like Forrest Gump than a future UK prime minister. 

The other things that struck me is that Ed, Labour and the No campaign were not averse to this kind of media coverage during the Scottish independence referendum when the press pack made countless personal attacks on First Minister Alex Salmond and a huge fuss about some asshole throwing an egg at Labour's Jim Murphy.

While studiously ignoring or playing down a road rage incident involving the First Minister's official car and violent scenes in Glasgow's George Square when a Unionist gang launched a premeditated attack on a perfectly peaceful Yes campaign event.   

The point being that if you are going to change the nature of political reporting, then you've got to lead by example, but as history shows the Labour party is quite happy to court The Sun and The Mail newspapers when it suits their own narrow interests. 

A clunker of a speech... and even a kiss that missed: QUENTIN LETTS sees the lacklustre Labour leader struggle to impress even the faithful

By QUENTIN LETTS - The Mail

Last time we had spin doctors desperately igniting applause for a flailing leader was at the Tory conference days before Iain Duncan Smith was dumped.

Oh dear. It is a measure of how pea-soupy, how humdrum and adolescent Ed Miliband’s speech was yesterday, that three of his claque stood at the side of the hall and tried to get the crowd clapping.

Tom Baldwin, Greg Beales and John McTernan – Mr Miliband’s grimmest henchmen – were to the left of the auditorium. Within five minutes it was apparent the speech was fast going phutt. Mr Miliband, having again opted for a memorised performance, was uncertain of his words.

The leader talked blithely about ‘day one of me as Prime Minister’ and referred to ‘this Labour Government’

Gaps appeared between sentences. The rhetorical energy was so faint, it could have done with a snort of smelling salts.

Leader Miliband – who could well be our Prime Minister in just over seven months’ time – was speaking so slowly, the audible, delayed feed in the exhibition hall outside caught up with him. The sign-language man downed fingers because he was in danger of lapping Mr Miliband.

I saw one of the red T-shirted stewards eat such an almighty yawn, he could have been a Manchester hedgehog preparing for hibernation.

And still Mr Miliband stood there, hands churched, gazing at the audience in silence as he admired his last sentence.

‘Ain’t I just the most dandy winner?’ that look said. He talked blithely about ‘day one of me as Prime Minister’. He referred to ‘this Labour Government’. Even Tony Blair, with his vast lead in the opinion polls in 1996, was not so conceited.

Did Mr Miliband think his slow-motion, whispery delivery would sound intimate, homespun? ‘Now here’s a fing,’ he said, in the way Max Bygraves used to say ‘I’ll tell you a story’.

He used this mock-matey idiom seven or eight times: ‘now here’s a question for you’; ‘but here is the question for Britain’; ‘here’s the funny thing, friends’ and so forth.

Summing up his main policy package, he said ‘six national goals, folks’. Folks? Was this really the pre-election oration of a statesman? Where was the despatch, the gravitas, the urgent sense of mission one normally finds in Opposition leaders before they win power?

The pair joked about the mishap before later having a quick peck in front of the clapping crowd and cameras

I suppose we should admire his wonkish cleverness in learning more than an hour’s worth of meandering nonsense, but when the country is about to go to the polls, might he not have been wiser to stand full-square behind a lectern and deliver grown-up proposals for our taxes and public services?

Mrs Thatcher in 1978, Tony Blair in 1996, David Cameron in 2009: they seized their audiences, shook the country by the scruff.

This goofy clunker, with his cliches and opaque policies, his refusal to state in detail where the money is going to come from – his inability even to mention welfare reforms! – just radiated a lazy sense of entitlement. He wanted ten years in power. He could not explain vividly what he would do in ten months, or even ten days.

The Baldwin-Beales-McTernan trio realised the speech was tanking. Lines which had been written to win instant applause passed without so much as a murmur of agreement from the audience. Ennui, langour, drift.

Messrs Beales and McTernan started to slap their hands hard to try to inject urgency and get the crowd excited. Multi-millionaire-by-marriage Mr Baldwin even started whooping. Odd, really, because Mr Miliband was attacking the rich at that point.

The audience, while it found its places before the main event, was entertained by a choir of children who sang ‘You’re My Hero’ and the theme from the Lion King. Then we had a brief montage of film clips which showed their Ed nodding as he met factory workers, troops, police officers. We saw him in a train. In a plane. Ed Mil, man on a mission!

Enter Hamlet. He slipped in the back, then took his place on the platform. After a quite properly serious opening about the Syrian emergency, which lasted all of two minutes, he thanked Gordon Brown for helping to persuade Scotland to stay in the Union.

Delegates, aware that there have been tensions between Mr Brown and the current Labour leadership, gave a warm, prolonged cheer that seemed to say ‘we like Gordon better than you, mate’.

The pair eventually managed to get the kiss right and had a peck on the lips in front of the waiting crowd

Mr Miliband (pictured with wife Justine) is currently languishing with an approval rating of minus 23 per cent

Now came the first of several descriptions, not all of them convincing, of meetings Mr Miliband had had with members of the electorate.

He dripped these encounters throughout his speech. There had been Josephine and Gareth and two women in a London park. There had been Rosie and Colin, though Colin had since died, poor fellow. And there had been Elizabeth.

Guess what? Elizabeth, a mechanic, was in our very midst. Stand up, Elizabeth. She rose. Everyone clapped. Mr Miliband left her standing there for a while. I think he perhaps forgot what he was going to say. So he told her to sit down.

We had an ode (or so it felt) to the word ‘together’. He said it six times in one sentence. ‘Together, a different idea for Britain – the inspiration is all around us. We want to reach the talents of every single person. The great entrepreneurs. The brilliant National Health Service. Our brilliant Armed Forces.’

It was the sort of gibberish a teenage poet spouts after first falling in love. But, snap, now he was making a savage denunciation of millionaires and bankers and oligarchs and wicked David Cameron.

‘We know what kinda election campaign they’re gonna play,’ he then said, flicking to Mr Innocent.

This was not a good speech. It was not even a mediocre speech. It was ripe nonsense. It was deluded. Dotty.

Other adjectives that spring to mind: windy, sluggish, evasive, hypocritical. He attacked the Coalition for its handling of the economy – an area in which even Labour supporters think the Tories and Lib Dems have done well. He complained about unemployment – yet jobs are increasing fast.

Where was the coup de theatre? He reheated themes from his conference speech last year on seizing land from property firms and going after electricity companies.

Aides said Mr Miliband's speech, which was given without notes, had ‘changed’ as it was being delivered

He got on to gay rights – another area where the Cameroons have, excellently, stolen the centre ground - and I wondered if some great new policy initiative might be imminent.

The best he could announce was that ex-EastEnders actor Lord (Michael) Cashman is to be Labour’s international ambassador on gay and lesbian rights.

Mr Miliband spoke of his coming ‘interview’ with the British people, as though he was applying for a job at a think-tank or advertising agency.

Yet we are talking here of the premiership. To be Prime Minister is to have control over the lives of servicemen, to be custodian of our nuclear weaponry, to manage our nation’s treasures – not just of gold, or what is left of it after the last time Labour was in power – but also of culture and attitudes.

A Prime Minister must be able almost subconsciously to give voice to a people’s sentiments, as Mr Blair did at the death of Diana, as Mrs Thatcher did in her response to the Falklands, and as Mr Cameron did after the Bloody Sunday inquiry.

Do we look at Ed Miliband, so jejune in his mannerisms, so palpably terrified on the streets of Scotland this month, and see a human vessel capable of meeting the demands of this position?

The premiership very nearly broke big, growling Gordon Brown. Are we really now going to entrust it to this peculiarly insubstantial figure? For that, quite aside from the disastrous economic implications of a return to Labour financial management, is the crux of the coming election.

The character of the man who would be PM: it is an unavoidable part of electoral calculations, and it is one on which even Labour MPs and activists concede they have a problem – called Ed.

As he took the applause of the hall at the end, he jabbed forward to peck his wife Justine on the lips. Then, like a nervous adolescent, he leant in again – only for Mrs M to sway away. Might he have the same effect on the British electorate a few months hence?