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Miliband
Yorkshire Post - 26
February 2007
He is able, articulate, affable and ambitious. He is tall, spare of frame. Despite the first flush of white in his black, short-cropped hair he still looks as if he has just graduated into long trousers. Academically he is bright – a “first” at Oxford followed by a Kennedy Scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of technology.
At 41, he is just a year older than Conservative leader David Cameron.
David Miliband is the man a growing number of Labour back-benchers and political commentators would like to see as the next leader of the Labour Party and, hence, Prime Minister.
If David Cameron has trodden one well-worn path into British politics – affluent upper middle-class background with aristocratic links, money, Eton, Oxford and a seemingly effortless rise in the Conservative Party, Miliband has followed an equally well-established route. The children of Jewish refugees in Britain have played formative roles in both major parties. His grandfather Samuel was a Polish Jew who served in the Red Army. His father Ralph was a Marxist philosopher who sought refuge from Belgium in Britain during the Second World War.
Miliband’s rise in the Labour party has matched Cameron’s in the Tories. From the Institute for Public Policy Research ( IPPR, the pre-eminently New Labour think tank) he became Blair’s head of policy and, when Labour took power, he ran the downing St Policy Unit. By 2001 he was installed in the safe Labour seat of South Shields. After brief spells as a minister at Education, the Cabinet Office and in charge of local government he succeeded Margaret Beckett as Secretary of State for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs last May.
Even his opponents would admit that he has put in a competent performance. He set out to win officials’ confidence (reportedly even queuing in the canteen line for lunch!), made a virtue of admitting that he had everything to learn about agriculture and did not attempt to gloss over the disastrous failures of the Rural Payments Agency. But at the top of his agenda is climate change – as it is with Cameron.
Miliband is a fluent communicator though without Blair’s passionate persuasiveness. Indeed, his more academic and conversational style can lead him into gaffes. Intending to defend Blair’s record he told an Any Questions audience that six months into a Brown regime the public might well regret the departure of his predecessor. He runs a blog – the “must-have” accessory for the modern politician - though one wonders what this cerebral figure really has to contribute to the debate about the goings-on in the Big Brother House!
He has also seemed out of sorts with Brown over environmental policies. Miliband’s calls for a more active of national policy of carrots and sticks to influence behaviour have been spurned by the Chancellor who looks much more to international agreement.
David is adamant that he backs Brown and will not stand against him. He sees his generation (which includes Ed Balls, Gordon Brown’s closest confident and his younger brother Ed Miliband, Doncaster MP, Cabinet Office minister and part of the Brown inner circle) as offering a new way forward which takes the New Labour project beyond both the arguments and, significantly, many of the players in the old Blair-Brown stand-offs. His set of young and upwardly mobile Labour ministers – characterised not always affectionately as the Primrose Hill Gang – still have strong links with the IPPR, which does for the Labour Party the thinking beyond the radar which the Social Market Foundation sets out to deliver to the Tories.
Miliband is not a charismatic figure in the Labour Party. His party conference speeches lack the sheer emotional and rhetorical power to send the delegates out to the barricades. And the supporters he does have include loners like Frank Field, who tend to be more respected by their opponents than by their friends. Indeed, if pressed, many Tory MPs would admit that Miliband might be a more formidable opponent at the general election than Gordon Brown.
And this is precisely why the pressure on Miliband to stand will not go away. The two latest opinion polls (one showing a 13 point Cameron lead over Brown) have enhanced the already persistent frisson of unease and fear in the Labour Party. Labour may not be able to win with Brown.
But what’s in it for Miliband? If he stands and loses he will have to withstand the life-long enmity of the winner – Brown does not forget injuries. If, against the odds, he wins it is difficult to imagine anything other than a thunderous and rancorous departure by Brown leaving a disabled government. Better to hold his hand and hope for the big job that will set him up for the post-Brown future, even if this means Opposition and a fight amongst his generation of MPs for the soul of the party.
© Yorkshire Post
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