Ed Miliband, son of the influential left-wing intellectual Ralph Miliband, was elected to the House of Commons in 2005. After Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in 2007, Miliband was quickly promoted to become a minister in the Cabinet Office, and then Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. Miliband defeated his brother David in the fourth round of the leadership contest that followed Brown’s resignation in the aftermath of the 2010 general election defeat. Tim Bale argues that Ed Miliband was ultimately an unsuccessful Labour leader in statecraft terms. He lost the 2015 general election and saw the number of Labour MPs in Parliament further decline from 2010. However, Miliband faced enormous challenges as leader that should be factored into our assessment. He took over after a crushing defeat in 2010 – which would always have been difficult for the party to recover from – and the increasing fragmentation of the electorate made fostering a winning electoral strategy difficult. He also faced skilled opponents in David Cameron and George Osborne.
• • •
Ed Miliband isn’t the first Labour leader never to become Prime Minister. Nor, given that exactly the same thing happened to Neil Kinnock in 1992, is he the first Labour leader to think, on the eve of an election, that he might soon be standing on the steps of No. 10, only for the results on the night to tell a completely different story to the one told by opinion polls, thereby dashing his dreams. Indeed, Miliband’s defeat by David Cameron in May 2015 was every bit as devastating as the one suffered by Kinnock at the hands of John Major almost a quarter of a century before. And it prompted just as many people who had previously kept their doubts to themselves, at least in public, to tell anyone who would listen that they always knew he would lose. History, however, may end up judging him just a little more kindly. This, after all, was a man whose party, only a few months before he took over in September 2010, had slid to one of its worst ever electoral defeats; a man whose legitimacy as leader was contested from the get-go; a man who clearly lacked the kind of charisma seen as a sine qua non in our 24/7 multi-media environment; a man whose political opponents probably stooped lower than they had ever stooped in order to prevent him winning. And yet, winning – or, at least, preventing Cameron from winning – was precisely what many pundits and pollsters were predicting Miliband was going to do. How, then – using the idea of statecraft to frame our analysis – do we explain the way in which he appeared to come so near, yet ended up so far away?
Ed Miliband, for all his faults, always had three things going for him as a person and as politician, namely: self-belief; reasonably good people skills; and a marked facility with numbers. Miliband was always good at the latter, even as a teenager: indeed, it was one reason he got into baseball (after spending some time in the United States when he was growing up) – a game for those who love stats as much as sports. No surprise, then, that mathematics provided one of the A grades that helped get him from his London comprehensive into Oxford to read PPE. No surprise either that, once there, he dropped philosophy and focused on economics – a subject in which he eventually went on to take a Master’s at the LSE, the university where his father Ralph had first forged a name for himself as one of the country’s foremost left-wing intellectuals. It seemed natural, too, that, after a short stint working as a television researcher, Miliband was drawn not just to Labour, but to its Treasury team.
To his detractors, of course, the fact that Miliband spent over a decade working for Brown, initially as a special advisor and eventually as chair of his Council of Economic Advisors, was little more than a schooling in the top-down, ‘government-knows-best’ statism so beloved of the so-called ‘clunking fist’. Perhaps, but Miliband’s long spell at the Treasury proper between 1997 and 2005, when he was elected for the rock-solid Labour constituency of Doncaster North, was also a highly practical education in power. He emerged from the experience convinced that whoever came after Blair and Brown would have to transcend the TB–GBs – the tensions and mistrust between the two men and their camps that threatened to tear apart New Labour from the top down. Miliband also emerged knowing which levers to pull and what buttons to press, both in Whitehall and at Westminster. But he did so, in marked contrast to some of those he worked with, without losing his reputation as a genuinely nice (if slightly geeky) guy – someone able, partly because of that reputation and partly because his older brother David was stranded on the other side, to reach across the Blair–Brown divide. Not for nothing did Ed earn the nickname, among those who worked for Tony rather than Gordon, as ‘the emissary from Planet Fuck’.
Ultimately, however, what some see as Miliband’s inveterate tendency to want to square circles did not mean he could avoid choosing between New Labour’s two rival poles of attraction. Undoubtedly, ideology played a part in him jumping one way rather than the other: Brown was – just about – more his kind of social democrat than was Blair. It was also obvious, at least to anyone who could count, that the Chancellor would sooner or later take over at No. 10. Accordingly, when Brown assumed the premiership in late June 2007, Miliband was immediately rewarded with a place in Cabinet, alongside his brother, making them the first siblings to sit together at the top table for nearly seventy years. True, David (as Foreign Secretary) had a much higher profile, especially since, to begin with, Ed was at the Cabinet Office – not necessarily a backwater, but very much a backroom. The gap in seniority between the two narrowed just a little, though, when, in October 2008, Brown appointed Ed secretary of state at the newly created Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC).
Reviews of Miliband during his time at the DECC are mixed. To his critics, he mimicked his former master’s desire to have it both ways and to delay decisions – the fatal flaw that led directly to Brown bottling the ‘election that never was’ in 2007, and therefore crashing (along with the economy) to defeat three years later. To his admirers, Miliband was in his element. The brief was one that needed a minister who could do detail, think through competing options, and, yes, add and subtract. As for bold and swift decisions (as his friends protest), he took rather than ducked them. For instance, within a fortnight of taking the job, Miliband confirmed that the government would be legislating for eye-watering cuts in emissions. A few months later, he was announcing targets for carbon capture that effectively ruled out the building of new coal-fired power stations in the UK. Miliband also wrung more green-tinged concessions out of Brown on a third runway at Heathrow than many imagined possible.
Even when global climate change talks ran disappointingly into the sand in Copenhagen at the end of 2009, there was an upside. They had provided Miliband with some much-needed overseas experience, but without involving so much foreign travel that he risked, like his brother David, being stranded too far away from the action at home. Now they were over, he could focus on the home remit further, especially since Brown had charged him with drawing up Labour’s manifesto for the coming election. Ed, incidentally, was not one of those front or backbenchers who needed to be elsewhere when the parliamentary expenses scandal broke a year before the election. Indeed, he was one of those MPs who had absolutely nothing to apologise for – or to pay back. That this was the case owed less to his facility with numbers than to his old-fashioned sense of propriety. As a well-paid servant of the crown, living with long-term partner Justine, who, as a lawyer, was capable of earning even more than he was, it simply would not have entered his head to claim for the kinds of things that some of his fellow MPs clearly felt happy to charge to the public purse.
But it was not Miliband’s spotless record on expenses that saw him through the 2010 Labour leadership contest – a race he’d decided to enter long before the party lost the election in May of that year. His success – and his conviction that he would be successful – came down, once again, to his underlying assurance, friendliness and ability to count. The relationships Miliband had built with union bosses as he put together Labour’s 2010 manifesto were clearly crucial: anyone working out how to win the leadership knew the unions were a vital constituency that needed courting, and the decision of most of them to back him clearly proved crucial. Equally crucial, however, was the fact that, unlike his brother, he’d always taken the trouble to chat happily to colleagues, regardless of their rank. That, along with the fact that his small (but perfectly formed) team ruthlessly framed the contest as one between their ‘change candidate’ and a Blairite throwback, proved vital when the contest came down, as Ed always figured it might, to a handful of MPs’ second preferences going to him rather than David.
Miliband, it is true, under-estimated just how much his brother’s wounded sense of entitlement (which eventually saw him quit politics and go off to New York to head up a development charity) would tear them apart. But what choice, one wonders, did he really have? Given how unlikely the party was to elect two Milibands in a row, if he really wanted to be leader (which he did), it was literally a one-shot, zero-sum game. Moreover, it was a game Ed believed he had to win because he was convinced – not altogether unreasonably, perhaps – that he stood a better chance than David of preserving the unity of a party that had traditionally sunk into civil war after any big defeat. He was equally convinced he knew how to move on from New Labour in a way that could both help snatch back Downing Street and move the country away from its traditional short-termist, overly financialised, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ style of capitalism. He wanted to move towards the more managed yet decentralised version seen in, say, Germany – a country that Miliband, encouraged by his long-time consiglieri Stewart Wood, had viewed as something as a model for a social democracy that wants to combine sustainability, efficiency and social protection.
It was this, and his willingness to publicly criticise and interfere in allegedly dysfunctional markets (including the newspaper market), that saw Miliband branded ‘Red Ed’ by the media, and almost guaranteed him damaging hostility from many in the business world. Yet – along with his opportunistic opposition to hasty missile strikes on Syria in August 2013 and his commitment to reducing university tuition fees – such interventions not only put Labour onside with majority opinion, but also sent a clear signal to left-leaning, if not centrist, voters that the party was back on their side. And it forced the Tories even further into the ‘party of the rich’ corner, into which they’d already painted themselves after George Osborne reduced the top rate of tax in his 2012 ‘omnishambles’ Budget. Along with Labour’s inevitable focus on the NHS and on opposing the bedroom tax, Osborne’s Budget also allowed Miliband to quietly shift Labour’s stances on immigration and welfare considerably closer (if not, in the end, sufficiently close) to public opinion than they had been in 2010 – and in such a way as to attract amazingly little internal opposition. And that was also the case when it came to his historic reforms of the party’s links with the unions, and his refusal, after flirting with it early on in his leadership, to carry on simply parroting their anti-austerity line.
None of those shifts, of course, did anything to help Labour address its precipitous loss of support to the more self-consciously socially democratic Scottish Nationalist Party – a meltdown that ultimately contributed heavily to the failure of Miliband’s five-year mission (although, given he was intimately involved in Labour’s Scottish Parliament election campaign back in 1999 as a special advisor, he might perhaps have done more to foretell and forestall the meltdown). Nor, however – and much more importantly – did these shifts to the centre (or even the right) do anywhere near enough to undermine the Tories’ lead on the economy and their message that Labour couldn’t be trusted with the public purse.
Given Miliband’s own academic background and his father’s Marxism – which, for all the abstruse arguments had with others of his ilk about ‘structure versus agency’, nonetheless acknowledged the centrality of economic matters – his failure to properly come to grips with Labour’s inability to win back voters’ trust on the economy is mystifying. But only at first glance. The evidence clearly shows that the UK’s ballooning deficit and debt were overwhelmingly accounted for by the global financial crisis rather than Labour profligacy. Whether or not the politician in Miliband might have brought himself to pretend that this was not, in fact, the case, and to say sorry for a crime that had never been committed, is unknown, but the economist in him never could. Besides, the economist in him was also betting that George Osborne would be unable to conjure up a sufficiently steep rise in real wages to see the UK’s belated return to growth deliver a ‘feel-good factor’ tangible enough to get the Conservatives over the line. However, because the economy looked as if it was, at long last, on the up, and because Labour still wasn’t trusted sufficiently to run it and to control spending, it was a wager that failed.
Miliband’s other big gamble failed, too. He realised (how could he fail to?) that he had severe presentational problems. Maybe because they didn’t like how he looked and sounded, or maybe because they saw something unnatural in a younger brother supposedly ‘knifing’ his older sibling to get what he wanted, voters never warmed to him. Miliband worked hard to up his game, and managed, during the general election campaign, at least, to exceed the public’s low expectations of him. But, in the end, he was betting that what he thought of as ‘substance’ would ultimately triumph over what he dismissed as ‘style’ – that victory would surely go to the wonkish and well-meaning challenger than to the preternaturally posh ‘essay-crisis Prime Minister’, who simply looked and sounded the part. As it turned out, his opponent – or, at least, those behind his opponent’s campaign – proved every bit as adept with numbers as he was. David Cameron and his Conservative Party ended up with over 2,000,000 votes more than Labour, and an overall majority to boot. Miliband – who had been preparing, indeed expecting, to enter negotiations to form a government, even as the exit poll suggesting things hadn’t gone to plan was announced – was just as stunned as almost everyone else. By the next morning, he was gone, leaving his shell-shocked party to pick up the pieces, work out what had happened, and get on with choosing his successor.
By definition, since Labour lost the 2015 general election – and lost it badly – Ed Miliband failed to master this most basic of statecraft’s tasks. Even his record in the various electoral contests that took place between the two main events that bookended his five years as leader left rather a lot to be desired – so much so that, although the results he achieved were never quite poor enough to prompt disgruntled colleagues to unseat him, they should probably have rung more alarm bells than they did at the time.
Things began ominously with elections to the Scottish Parliament in 2011, where the SNP captured an amazing 44 per cent of the vote to Labour’s measly 26 per cent – a drubbing in what was once Labour’s heartland. In retrospect, that should have been taken far more seriously as a harbinger of the harrowing to come. In 2012, things looked a little more promising, at least superficially. In local elections in the rest of the country, which took place not only mid-term, but also in the wake of Osborne’s omnishambles Budget, Labour gained over 800 councillors, on what psephologists calculated was a notional vote share of some 39 per cent. Yet Labour’s lead over the Tories was only 6 percentage points, and it did not do well in all the areas it would need in order to make a strong comeback and win parliamentary constituencies in 2015. By the 2013 local elections, Labour’s notional vote share had dropped to just 29 per cent – still ahead of the Tories (on just 25 per cent), but significantly lower than its ratings in opinion polls, suggesting (especially in hindsight) that the latter might have been overstating the party’s actual support. A year later, Labour’s notional vote share at the 2014 local elections was only around 31 per cent – a poor result, only disguised, firstly, by the fact that it appeared to be doing reasonably well in areas in which it had target seats, and, secondly, by extensive polling on the part of Tory peer Lord Ashcroft, which suggested that Labour was performing slightly better in marginal constituencies than it was nationally. If that was ever the case, it didn’t help Labour much in the European Parliament elections that took place at the same time as the local council contest. Labour (on 24 per cent) was beaten into second place by UKIP (on 27 per cent), with the distribution of votes across the regions suggesting that, as some had begun to predict, Nigel Farage’s ‘People’s Army’ might end up causing Miliband as many problems as Cameron. Just as worryingly, perhaps, was that Labour only narrowly beat the Tories (on 23 per cent).
Yet the fact that Miliband’s electoral strategy wasn’t a winning one doesn’t mean he lacked any strategy at all. Indeed, one of the main accusations levelled at him by his critics, both before and after the election, was that he was pursuing what they insisted was a ‘35 per cent strategy’ – derived, they claimed, from the conviction that Labour could scrape a narrow victory by retaining the 29 per cent of voters who voted for them in 2010, and adding another 6 per cent, made up primarily from left-wing idealists who had voted Lib Dem at the last election, but had abandoned the party in disgust at Nick Clegg going into coalition with David Cameron. In truth, while Miliband clearly hoped that something like this could be effected, neither he nor his closest advisors believed they could afford to rely completely on such a combination (even if mobilised by what Labour hoped was a superior ‘ground game’) getting them over the line. After all, some previous Labour voters were bound to switch to the Tories, and not all those disillusioned with the Lib Dems (even assuming they had come over to Labour early on) would stay put. Besides, Miliband and those around him had high hopes of encouraging significant numbers of previous non-voters and first-time voters to give the party the benefit of the doubt. Nor did they completely give up hope that at least some of those who had supported the Tories in 2010 could be persuaded to move in Labour’s direction. Indeed, they were seeing little tangible benefit from any economic recovery, and a serious decline in the performance of the NHS, while Miliband was moving Labour’s position on immigration, welfare, and tax and spend much closer to that of the average voter.
The problem with this electoral strategy was that Miliband had won the leadership in the summer of 2010 by appealing not just to those in the party who wanted to move on from the Blair/Brown era (something many voters were happy enough to do), but to those who regarded the very idea of New Labour as some sort of neo-liberal/colonialist aberration. This, and his desire to lock Lib Dem defectors with a left-populist pitch (which he hoped might also appeal to working-class voters who had become detached from Labour since 1997), prevented him from heading as rapidly and as noisily for the centre ground as he should have. Although it eventually happened – and on immigration, welfare, and (by the end) tax and spend, it is important to stress that it did happen – it happened too late, and, for the most part, too stealthily, to make much difference. The desire, if not to ditch, then to at least move beyond New Labour, also prevented Miliband reaching back and reminding people of the party’s very real achievements – particularly in health and education, and on the economy – between 1997 and 2010. Moreover, segmenting the electoral market, while it may have seemed sensible, risked blotting out the more fundamental truth that any party hoping to win elections has to win over a more nebulous but ultimately far bigger bunch of voters – the archetypal residents of Middle England, who simply want to get on in life, like to see a bit of leadership, value sound government as well as public services, and worry about others ripping them off.
Ed Miliband did chalk up some noticeable wins as Leader of the Opposition, though. He halted what many voters clearly regarded as an ill-advised rush in the summer of 2013 to strike Syria militarily. He also forced the government to take a tougher stance on press regulation (even if it later managed to wriggle out of it) in the wake of the widespread disquiet over revelations in 2011 that tabloid journalists had engaged in systematic hacking of mobile telephones. But, even if these examples demonstrated considerable courage (and, in the case of Syria, helped to bend the rules of the constitutional game in favour of Parliament and against the executive), in neither case was what Miliband did particularly counter-intuitive. Consequently, they failed to cut through a way that might have led undecided voters to re-evaluate either him or his party – something that badly needed to happen sooner rather than later. In particular, Miliband waited far too long before publicly committing his party to fiscal consolidation. He also failed, once he’d done so, to adopt measures that might have made a few Labour eyes water and therefore would’ve commanded attention and respect (cancelling HS2 and going back on his early commitment to reduce university tuition fees are only the most obvious examples). As a result, Miliband was simply unable ever to persuade people that he really meant it.
Worse, all the time that this was going on, the Conservatives, and their supporters in the media, were utterly relentless (and highly successful) in persuading voters that Labour was to blame for the country’s economic difficulties. They made the case that the sensible response to the latter was to reduce spending on supposedly non-core public services, with particular emphasis on pruning back welfare entitlements for working-age and younger people. This was an easy target given the widespread belief that those in receipt of such benefits were lazy and feckless scroungers, rather than (as is the case for the majority of those concerned) simply ordinary people who have fallen on hard times. By the same token, the Tories did little or nothing to counter the equally widespread (if equally misguided) perception that many immigrants are actually ‘benefit tourists’, whose number can be reduced if only the EU would allow the UK to clamp down on their ability to claim. Miliband, along with those shadowing the Treasury, the Home Office, and the Department for Work and Pensions, clearly decided Labour would have to recognise that ‘perception is reality’ and adjust its policies in all three areas. Ed Balls (eventually) committed the party to a fully costed programme that would eliminate the deficit in one parliament, while Yvette Cooper and Rachel Reeves made sure Labour went into the 2015 election promising a much tougher line on immigration and welfare than it had back in 2010.
This meant, of course, that Miliband effectively ceded political argument hegemony to his Tory opponents in three electorally crucial areas; although, given that government rather than opposition is by far the best place to try to shift the terms of the debate, whether he could sensibly have done much else is another matter. Anyone tempted to think he should have played things differently should look at what happened when he tried to do otherwise: his populist rhetoric on predatory business and his promise of price freezes worried rather than enthused swing voters, most of whom weren’t convinced he would deliver anyway. Likewise, his commitments on the NHS, while aligned with widespread public support for that institution, were discounted because of concerns that his other policies would mean there would be insufficient resources to fund them.
Finally, Miliband’s promise to scrap the bedroom tax, to clamp down on zero-hour contracts, to increase the minimum wage, to raise the top rate back to 50p, to introduce a mansion tax, to reduce university tuition fees, and to scrap ‘non-dom’ status for rich foreign residents all struck a chord with a British public characteristically concerned about helping those at the bottom of the heap without being taken for a ride by those at the top. But his insistent focus on that agenda may well have made it seem as if Labour, unlike the Conservatives, had nothing much to say to those who weren’t at the bottom or at the top, but in the middle – in other words, the vast majority of voters. That said, Miliband is far from the only leader of a European social democratic party to be facing the same problem: all are, in some ways, the victims of a social and cultural change that has eroded and alienated their traditional base, as well as economic circumstances that mean there is no longer enough growth or enough money to ensure all shall have prizes.
Ed Miliband managed to shift Labour’s policies towards the centre and to promote new talent without conveying any serious sense of disunity or indiscipline. Naturally, there were arguments – sometimes heated arguments – behind closed doors. However, they were often as much to do with personalities (and his private office and media operation) as politics, and, even in so far as they were occasionally about ends as well as means, they were rarely, if ever, the product of trench warfare between two opposing factions. Indeed, when it came, say, to promoting and demoting people to and from the front bench, Miliband was probably no less adept than most of his predecessors at maintaining a balance between left, right and centre. It is also important to note that he was courageous enough to demand, and canny enough to win, changes to the PLP’s rules, which meant that, unlike his predecessors as Labour Leader of the Opposition, he could appoint his own shadow Cabinet, rather than have people foisted on him by his MPs via elections.
That said, Miliband’s critics (especially those who believed Labour had to do more to convince the electorate that it was serious about tackling the nation’s debt and deficit) argued, with some justification, that the unity he achieved was more apparent than real. That unity was perhaps only the product of: (a) polling, which suggested that Labour had a chance of winning, and, as a result, helped keep his colleagues either on board or at least quiet; (b) a leader unwilling to make the ‘hard choices’ that would make voters sit up and take notice, but who would not spark outrage among the party faithful and unions; (c) the leader’s ultimately counter-productive penchant for disguising shifts to the centre on immigration, welfare, and tax, his opposition to the bedroom tax, zero-hour contracts and tuition fees, and his undying love for the NHS; and (d) the more-or-less explicit decision by many Blairite ultras that he be allowed to fail so that, if and when he lost, they could claim Blair’s alternative had been ‘tested to destruction’.
Of course, disunity might have broken out if any of the bad blood created by Miliband’s decision in 2013 to re-cast (although not abandon) his party’s relationship with the trade unions had ended up on the carpet. However, it did not – thanks to the determination of both the Labour leader and the unions themselves to come to some sort of negotiated solution, rather than risk a stand-up fight so close to an election they were desperate to win. Given that voters are nowadays much less worried about unions (and union influence) than they are about politicians who cannot control their own parties, then the discretion and compromise achieved was surely the better part of valour. Miliband can take credit for diluting general secretaries’ influence on future Labour leadership contests by moving away from the three-way electoral college system, which elected him in 2010, to a single ‘selectorate’, comprising members, affiliated supporters and only those union members who explicitly opt in to affiliated membership. Moreover, he managed to do this at the same time as holding on to the union money that, without public funding, is vital to Labour’s day-to-day functioning, never mind its election campaigning.
Miliband was also able, aided by general secretary Iain McNicol, to ensure that the party remained in a reasonable state of repair at the grass roots. The upside of his frequently telling party members at least some of what they wanted to hear was that Labour’s membership (possibly boosted by an influx of left-wing Lib Dems) may well have risen during Miliband’s time as leader. Miliband also managed to get the approval of members both for changes to the way the party selected its leader and for a policy programme that many of those attending the 2014 National Policy Forum would, in their heart of hearts, have considered far too timid. Certainly, Labour did not lose the 2015 general election through any lack of effort or enthusiasm on the part of its activists on the ground.
Projecting governing competence is hard for any party that has just been ejected from office, particularly in the wake of perceived shortcomings in its management of the economy – arguably the key indicator of its overall credibility. If the leader of that party then fails, in opposition, to convince the electorate that he is personally ‘up to the job’, then voters may be more prepared than perhaps they should be to give the incumbent government the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, Labour after 2010 was hit with just such a ‘double whammy’. The long leadership contest that the party decided to hold in the summer of 2010 gave the Tories time to destroy virtually all its planes while they were still on the ground, obliterating the narrow lead on ‘best party to manage the economy’ that Labour had regained in the run-up to the general election. It was an advantage that Labour was never able to win back. Its early criticism of the coalition’s austerity programme was skilfully exploited by George Osborne to brand Miliband and Balls ‘deficit deniers’ and then to challenge their attempts later in the parliament (when the economy began to sputter into life again) to insist that they, too, favoured fiscal consolidation. Indeed, given how easy it was for the Tories to identify Labour’s leader with the supposedly profligate and hapless Brown regime, it might have been better, at least in hindsight, if Miliband had not (when Alan Johnson felt obliged to bow out as shadow Chancellor a few months after accepting the job) offered the Treasury portfolio to Ed Balls. Balls, after all, could just as easily be tarred with the same brush, and he was even more convinced than Miliband that the Tories would choke off any recovery and be punished for it by an electorate who would then give him the credit for being right all along.
Meanwhile, Miliband himself never managed to approach anything like take-off speed. Ultimately, of course, party leaders’ impacts, especially their impact on the electorate, may have less to do with that they actually do than with what they are – or are seen to be. In other words, the image they have and the impression they create may matter more than any of the moves they make. Moreover, image and impressions are not as easy to manufacture, nor to manipulate and shift, as some people think – particularly if the politician involved is, like Miliband, unwilling or unable in the early stages of his leadership to provide striking and attractive visual images that can ‘cut through’ to voters. Apart from the obligatory pre-conference family photos, Ed Miliband tended to rely on words. But they were never quite enough or quite right. His party conference speeches and his newspaper profiles, like nearly all examples of their genre, would often begin with an attempt to show the electorate the ‘real him’ – the emphasis, in his case, on the message that he was far less weird than his wonkish path to power and easily caricatured appearance suggested. Miliband also showed himself a loyal son, determined to defend the honour of his father against an assault on him by the Daily Mail as a Marxist who ‘hated Britain’.
None of it, however, seemed to make the slightest impact on the impression the electorate had formed of Labour’s leader from the outset. Focus group participants continued to write him off as ‘weak’ and ‘weird’, while the numbers derived from surveys always put him on a par with those leaders of the opposition who had gone on to lose, rather than those rarer specimens who had turned out incumbent governments. Voters, even a worryingly large minority of putative Labour voters, simply could not see Miliband as Prime Minister. As a result, the man actually doing the job, David Cameron, always beat him by a decent margin (albeit from a low base) on virtually all the leadership attributes tested by opinion researchers, except on the quality of ‘being in touch’ and/or ‘understanding ordinary people’, though even the Labour leader’s ratings on that score may well have been more a by-product of his party’s more ‘caring’ brand than the result of anything he himself said or did. In an era of valence politics and in a country where – post-Iraq, post-expenses, and post-global financial crash – voters want someone who radiates competence and looks willing and able to make the tough calls required, this was the final nail in Ed Miliband and Labour’s coffin.
Ed Miliband can be counted a failure – at least, in terms of statecraft. True, he managed the party reasonably well, achieving some important rule changes and maintaining unity. But he was unable to come up with a winning electoral strategy or to win the battle of ideas, and he never came anywhere near projecting governing competence. His critics, nonetheless, have to confront a few facts before rushing to condemn him completely.
First and foremost, Ed Miliband took over just after Labour had gone down to a defeat that was no less disastrous (at least outside Scotland) as the one it suffered in May 2015. The chances of anyone – even his supposedly sainted brother – turning that around in just one term were always tiny. Second, the difficulties faced by Labour in appealing to a more fragmented electorate – much of which is as concerned by immigration as it is with the economy and public services (and important parts of which do not feel sufficiently inspired to actually vote) – are shared by social democratic party leaders right across Europe. Third, Miliband was facing political opponents who are past masters (and much, much better than their Labour counterparts) at using office – at least, before they are seen to have occupied it for too long – in order to alter the terms of political debate. Finally, the Labour Party as a whole cannot escape responsibility for choosing Ed Miliband as its leader in the first place, and then, having chosen him, sticking with him when it became patently obvious that he would struggle ever to convince voters that he was the man for the job. This is not the first time the party has done so, and it is hard to believe it will be the last. Insanity, they say, is repeating the same mistake over and over and expecting a different result.