Miliband tendency

I’ve just got time for a quick post about tomorrow’s Labour leadership result.  As things stand, the polls have Ed Miliband as likeliest to win, beating his brother David, the early favourite and heir presumptive.  The prospect of ‘Red Ed’ as Labour leader has the Tory blogosphere salivating.  They’ve all bought into the idea that Ed will take Labour off to some sort of Cuban comfort zone, and that only David – as the Economist argued – could win back those millions of middle Englanders who once delivered Blair unto Downing St.

Having put money on Ed when he was at odds of 4.3 in the summer, I’ll be pretty pleased too if he wins.  But this LibCon glee seems like misplaced complacency to me, for the first time since the election.  I don’t agree with their analysis at all: firstly because we’ve no idea how Ed will behave once in office (and if he is completely, opportunistically against all the cuts, he will have more leeway to fight them than his more pragmatic brother) and secondly because of personality.  Not only has Bananaman shown himself to be a conniving coward of the highest order – publicly agonising over whether to regicide Gordon Brown at the very moment the prize was his for the taking, then chickening out of it – but I can’t be alone in finding him unappealingly arrogant, aggressive, humourless, and only capable of speaking in garbled think tank jargon.  Ed, by contrast, seems quite human; likeable, almost.  It was noticeable that during last week’s Question Time special, he won much more applause and laughter from the audience than his abstruse brother.  And even if he does bash the banks a bit more than Mili-D, who’s to say the public won’t buy that?  And to anyone about to point out that he wrote Brown’s manifesto, remember: David Cameron wrote Michael Howard’s.

And another thing: although I completely disagree with Ed Balls about free schools, fiscal responsibility, and much besides – and he’s up against Michael Gove, who is by far the coalition’s best performer, and a plausible future PM – he has shown himself to be a formidable politician during this campaign.  He’s clashed with David Miliband about the deficit (the latter still sticking to Alastair Darling’s policy of halving it over this parliament), whereas Ed Miliband has been much vaguer.  As Labour’s best non-Miliband asset, any new shadow cabinet would want him in a prominent role: probably as shadow chancellor.  With EdMil in charge, this arrangement seems much more plausible.  The duo of Ed and Ed would then be well placed, when the cuts come, to brainwash the intensely non-ideological public into forgetting whose fault it all was in the first place.

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