Here was documentary proof that the two most senior figures on the Labour front bench, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, were plotting to oust Tony Blair from the moment they entered Parliament in 2005. Not only that, but the plot was hatched in the midst of a security crisis when the Government was reeling from a terrorist attack. The producers of This Week huddled with the show’s presenter, Andrew Neil, in a frantic effort to include this bombshell of a story in the programme.
This was already a bad week for Ed Miliband after his failure to capitalise on the Prime Minister’s U-turns on NHS reform and prison reform at PMQs, but it just got a whole lot worse. He and Ed Balls emerge from these latest revelations as hatchet men for Gordon Brown, willing to do their master’s bidding no matter how ill-advised or inappropriate. Apart from their sheer effrontery – what on earth made them think they were entitled to start plotting against the very leader whose popularity had swept them into power? – there’s the lack of judgment. In the epic struggle between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, they backed the loser. They conspired to replace the man who had won three general elections on the trot, making him the most successful leader the Labour Party has ever had, with a walking black hole. The upshot was a historic defeat in which Labour got four million fewer working class votes than it did in 1997 and polled its lowest share of the vote since 1983.
The most politically significant thing about this story is the documentary proof it provides of Ed Miliband’s close ties to the Brownites. During the Labour leadership campaign he tried to position himself as the candidate of party unity, someone who could heal the rift that had handicapped New Labour during its 13 years in office. But it’s clear from these revelations that he is and always has been a Gordon Brown lackey. If anyone was in any doubt that his victory over his brother represented a triumph of the Brownites over the Blairites, here’s the evidence.
Had Ed Miliband agreed to be Gordon’s car-door-opener-in-chief because he was mesmerised by the Scotsman’s force of personality, that would be one thing. But the tragic thing is, it was also because he believed he was right on policy. He shares his master’s blind spot, believing that the British people are fundamentally progressive and will vote for a leader with an egalitarian agenda. That, surely, has been the biggest shortcoming of Miliband’s leadership – the conviction that Labour only needs to oppose the cuts in order to win the next election. He clearly shares his mentor’s scepticism about Blair’s public service reforms and on almost every important issue he’s retreated to the Old Labour default position. Like Brown, he stubbornly refuses to see the connection between Blair’s electoral success and his centrist policies and naively imagines that the public will vote for wholesale social democracy if only it’s articulated in the right way.
Reading through these documents, it brings home to me just what an extraordinary stroke of luck Ed’s victory was for the Prime Minister. Like some of David Cameron’s predecessors, the Brownites have no grasp of how to win over Middle England. There was a sophisticated, tough-minded candidate on the ballot during Labour’s leadership election – a candidate who could have mounted a convincing challenge for the centre ground – but he lost out to his younger brother. As this story makes clear, Ed had no grasp of how to win an election in 2005 and he has no grasp of how to win one now. He’s Gordon Brown lite. This story will have shortened his already precarious tenure by at least six months.
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