A Trip to the Theatre

26 April

 

• Two former Labour leaders who failed to win elections urge support for Ed Miliband.

 

• The campaign occupies its ‘comfort zone’ but gains little coverage.

 

• The next leader will have to broaden the party’s base.

 

 

‘SHE IS LABOUR ROYALTY’. That’s how Matthew Laza – the party’s energetic broadcasting officer – described Ed Miliband’s right-hand woman Rachel Kinnock. Well, today much of the royal family were out in force. Rachel herself had come to recce the venue. Her mother and father, Neil and Glenys Kinnock, were in the front row. And I ran in to a former courtier – or lynchpin of the then leader of the Opposition’s office – Neil Stewart in the bar. He was bemoaning Labour’s likely fate in Scotland.

The venue was the Almeida Theatre in Islington. The performance wasn’t the newly revived David Hare play Absence of War – which charts how a Labour leader who fails to be true to himself then fails to win an election. Instead it was something altogether less challenging. It was a rally for international development.

There was mild panic when the disgraced ex-Labour MP and indeed ex-con Denis MacShane was spotted by party staff outside. He was intent on going in and I had a brief chat with him. He had come to praise Ed Miliband, not bury him. He observed that the electorate would normally give an incumbent government a second chance but whatever the outcome Miliband had fought a surprisingly good fight and steadfastly faced down those calling for an EU referendum. Not wishing to cause embarrassment he would take in proceedings from the circle – accessed by a separate entrance – rather than watch from the main body of the hall.

The crowded event got under way hosted by former EastEnder Ross Kemp. Labour were deep in their comfort zone. Or discomfort zone. The Almeida had had a refurb and the seats were certainly softer than before. I remember coming to a performance of Brecht’s Life of Galileo here some years ago and it felt like I was sitting on a spike. When the Inquisition showed him the instruments, I was praying they would instead finish him off quickly so I could get a nice comfy seat in the pub across the road, which has now become a designer clothes shop. But there were other reasons to be discomfited. Speaker after speaker – such as the Shadow International Development Secretary Mary Creagh and the former Secretary of State Baroness Amos – set out the horrors of child poverty and the high rates not just of infant mortality but of mothers dying in child birth in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The only lighter moments came in a video message from Gordon Brown who recalled meeting Nelson Mandela along with the late singer/songwriter Amy Winehouse. ‘You have got a lot in common with my husband’ she tells a surprised South African leader. ‘How so?’ he inquires politely. ‘You have both spent ages in prison’. In another video message comedian Eddie Izzard observed that just 85 people own as much wealth as one half of the world’s population, and concluded ‘this is not good’.

The star turn was, of course, Ed Miliband himself. And he wasn’t here to deliver a counterintuitive message. He wasn’t going to tell the audience that he couldn’t promise to defend the international development budget until he had got the deficit down. Quite the reverse. He repeated that spending on foreign aid – along with health and education – would be protected. And he made clear it would be an early priority of his premiership to go to the UN general assembly in September and argue that other developed nations should raise their aid budgets to 0.7 per cent of GDP. And all this in the constituency represented by Emily Thornberry, the shadow minister who had allegedly so provoked Ed’s ire that she had to resign her post for the offence of snootily tweeting a photo of a white van and an England flag outside a voter’s home at the previous year’s Rochester byelection.

So now we had the spectacle of a current Labour leader being cheered by a past Labour leader who failed to win an election, having been praised on video by another leader who had failed to win an election, surrounded by Labour luvvies, in a left liberal metropolitan suburb.

It was easy meat for opponents but in fact the event got very little coverage in part due to the London Marathon, a football match at the nearby Emirates stadium, and emerging news of a genuine overseas emergency in Nepal – a devastating earthquake. If this had been an event to reinforce Labour’s values and reinvigorate grass roots support, back at base Ed Miliband’s staff had been working on a sixth election pledge designed to appeal to aspirational voters that hadn’t yet decided whom to back. By mid-afternoon I knew what it was. And it would be unveiled far away from the reassuringly supportive atmosphere of north London.