By this afternoon David or Ed Miliband could well be the new leader of the British Labour Party – but the wounds inflicted in the five-month campaign will take time to heal, writes MARK HENNESSY, London Editor
ALAN JOHNSON’S people were so sure he would win the race for the deputy leadership of the British Labour Party in 2007, as Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair as prime minister, that one of them agreed a signal with a television crew to give them a scoop on the result. If Johnson won, the handler would leave the count room wearing his glasses. But Harriet Harman stunned Johnson and everyone else by picking up enough second- preference votes to leave his candidature in the dust. The Johnson handler was so shocked that he forgot to take off his glasses when he left the room, leaving the embarrassed camera crew to pick up the pieces when the correct result was declared.
Today, Labour Party chiefs are intent on avoiding such media-handling errors. Before 3.30pm the five candidates to succeed Brown as leader will be brought into a private room at the Manchester convention centre where Labour is holding its annual conference. They will have to hand in their mobile telephones before the party’s general secretary, Ray Collins, tells them the results. They will then stay locked away until the opening conferences speeches have been made and the result of the complicated electoral-college election can be declared. The agony will be excruciating for the losers. Beginning alphabetically, with Diane Abbott, the results will be announced for each candidate in each of the colleges: MPs and MEPs; party members; and trade unionists who pay a political levy to Labour.
With just hours to go, few are willing to predict the outcome, though it is clear that Ed Miliband and his team have become significantly more bullish over the past week while his older brother, David, the long-time favourite, has become more nervous.
Some of Miliband the Younger’s declared confidence may have had much to do with encouraging MPs and MEPs who hadn’t yet voted to back him before polls closed, last Wednesday, but there is no doubt that he believes he can win. Equally, there is some evidence that his brother’s campaign has miscounted its support: one of David’s staff thanked an MP for his backing only to discover that the MP was, in fact, supporting the younger sibling.
Relations between the two, despite all the protestations of brotherly love, have suffered so much that their elderly mother, Marion, is said to fear for the future of the family bond once the ballot boxes are put away.
David Miliband should be ahead after the first round of voting, but his brother hopes to have a majority among union members and to overtake him in subsequent counts when the votes of Ed Balls, Andy Burnham and Diane Abbott are distributed.
David has run the more cautious of the two campaigns, with one eye on how his words during the battle could be used subsequently in dispatch-box confrontations with David Cameron, the Conservative prime minister. His 40-year-old brother, younger by nearly five years, has behaved differently, concentrating on the narrow electorate entitled to vote in this race rather than on the population at large that he would need to bring Labour back to power. In particular, he has focused on Labour’s links with the trade unions, saying he would not curb their remaining powers and highlighting Labour’s need to attract back some of the core voters it lost during the Blair years. The message has appealed to many of the Labour rank and file, who believe a coalition with the unions and others will be needed to combat the spending cuts to come under the Conservatives and Liberal Democrat coalition.
During the hustings Miliband the Younger repeatedly claimed that the party he served as an adviser, MP and cabinet minister had become fixated by the markets, becoming “the party of bankers’ bonuses”. But his strategy has come at a cost, allowing the UK’s largely Conservative-leaning media to portray him as Red Ed, a Michael Foot-style leader-to-be who would ensure that the party remained out of power for a generation.
Much of the way Ed Miliband has presented himself, and of the way others have presented him, in recent times is nonsense, despite his efforts to put as much distance between himself and the New Labour years as possible. For a start he was happy to accept a considerable donation from a hedge-fund manager, Lawrence Staden, who has made millions from currency speculation.
His brother, meanwhile, is the man the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats privately say they fear, believing he could take Labour out of its traditional bastions and grow it in England, particularly the southeast. Labour’s failure here after 1979 doomed the party to opposition. In Kent, for example, not a single Labour MP served between 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power, and 1997, when Labour under Blair won eight of the 17 seats in the county. This year the party went back to having none there.
Equally, though, Labour now must also focus on places where it was previously secure but suffered huge losses in 2010. Even though, for example, it still held on to Ashfield, in Nottinghamshire, a majority of 10,000 fell to just 192 after a 17 per cent swing to the Liberal Democrats, which was blamed on Labour’s concentration on middle-class voters.
Ed Balls has probably run the best campaign, fulminating about the Government’s deficit-cutting plans – though at a cost of blithely ignoring the legacy left by Labour – and turning in a strong Commons performance on education cuts. His message is that draconian cuts to government spending will provoke a double-dip recession by stifling the economic growth necessary to rebuild, and it is accepted, to varying degrees, by many who do not share Balls’s political sentiments.
It is a message that will be driven home by whoever becomes leader. For now the strategy has weaknesses, because it denies Labour’s own culpability and the fact that it planned to make three-quarters of the cuts now being contemplated had it been returned to office. But the strategy might gain in strength as people realise that talk of cuts is not an esoteric topic for discussion on Newsnight but means the closure of the local swimming pool or police station.
And as one election race ends today another will open: the battle for seats in Labour’s shadow cabinet, which will be just as crucial to the presentation of Labour’s message to the British public in the years ahead. For all of the talk of change, surprisingly little of it is on show. Heavyweights such as Alistair Darling and Jack Straw are standing aside, but few of the talented newcomers from this year’s general election, such as Lisa Nandy, Rachel Reeves and Chuka Umunna, have entered. Part of their caution is understandable. Labour MPs expect people to serve their time; even Tony Blair had five years behind him in the Commons before he joined the shadow cabinet. But boldness is a virtue, too.
