Ed Miliband has been elected not on account of any great qualities of his own but because he is not his brother, writes JOHN WATERS
IT IS difficult to avoid the thought that the Milibands have risen to their present positions not in spite of being brothers but precisely because of their common origins and the nature of their relationship.
Despite all the lovey-doviness over the weekend, it was obvious that their rivalry runs very deep, and, sure enough, it was a matter of hours before it began oozing out in David’s illuminating side-of-the-mouth rebuke to Harriet Harman. Miliband was absolutely right in pointing out that Harman, by applauding his brother’s criticism of Tony Blair’s record on Iraq, was engaging in a denial of the responsibility which at the time she had accepted.
That episode also cut to the heart of the true distinction between the Milibands, which is not really about any specific policy or ideological issue, but about what power means and how it is to be exercised. Put simply, David is a Blairite, coming at the end of a generation which approached the question of power with certain intentions and ideals, but later absorbed many lessons about the limits of its own prescriptions. An honest politician who is prepared to bear the burden of the responsibilities he takes on, he finds himself out of step with his times.
From a distance, and on his own assurances, Ed Miliband’s accession to the Labour leadership betokens the arrival of a new generation. But perhaps the reason he states this so repeatedly is that he suspects it isn’t true.
Really, he has been elected not on account of any great qualities of his own but because he is Not David. He is the revenge of the trade union movement for the sins of Blairism: New Labour, Clause Four, Alastair Campbell and the rest of it. He is the creature of forces which sat sullenly through the Blair years, waiting for their opportunity to strike back. And now, availing of the Miliband family romance, they have struck with a vengeance.
The architects of his coronation talk about Not David as a politician who “will develop”. In other words, he has been chosen not on the basis of his vision or experience but precisely because, lacking vision or experience, he offers a clean sheet on to which others may write what they please.
His leadership, for all its “new generation” rhetoric, is a reactionary phenomenon.
Representing the invisible power brokers of Old Labour, he lashes out at those who have sought to lead in accordance with reality as it presents itself.
His first speech as leader was that of a politician determined to avoid confrontation with anyone from whom he understands his power to flow. This includes both the trade union movement and the soft-left Guardian-reading constituency which has lately come to define itself by its opposition to Blair. In addition to being opposed to war, we learned that Not David is in favour of “love” and “compassion”.
Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were, to begin, masters in the manipulation of the optimism of their own generation, who grew into a cossetted adulthood determined to purge politics of pragmatism and self-interest, installing instead peace, love and understanding. Both men came to learn that power is not always amenable to an undiluted idealism, that politics is usually about choosing the lesser of evils. Both in their ways left their generation disappointed: Clinton because he couldn’t keep his trousers up and Blair because he refused to duck and dive on the question of responsibility in the face of tyranny.
Although Britain has become disenchanted by the experience of Blairism, it is enthralled by the idea of a Blair, who is in essence, like Clinton, a Kennedy clone.
Modern politics still plays with the idea of a saviour who will redeem our systems of public organisation, cleansing them of the stain of human imperfection. Blair came to see that this was not possible, and in power effected a massive change in his thinking, becoming, in effect, the kind of figure he would, in the beginning, have excoriated.
His autobiography A Journey is a debriefing for the baby-boomer generation, in effect a repudiation of Sixties utopianism. For those for whom the penny had yet to drop, Blair emerges from the book as an acute political intelligence who understood precisely the sensibility of his times.
He looks closely into his own gift for manipulation and also at the limits of manipulation, setting forth in detail the dilemmas of someone who came to power thinking you could change the world by exuding principle and good intention and discovering that power exercises the politician as much as the politician exercises power.
Interestingly, Ed Miliband is both an attempt to replicate Blair and a reaction against him.
He is also a reaction against the possibilities offered by his brother, who might have genuinely represented a new direction, still open to the possibilities of idealism but prepared to confront the growing petulance and childishness of the culture he has vainly offered himself to lead.