Five Year Mission
By Tim Bale, Oxford University Press
320 pages, $20
Ed Miliband is the first opposition leader in British history to have come to the job knowing the date when he would have to fight a general election. All of his predecessors were at the mercy of a constitution that allowed a sitting prime minister to dissolve parliament at will.
David Cameron, under the terms of his coalition agreement with the Liberal Democrats, forewent that privilege. This is no minor technical tweak to the apparatus of British politics. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 drastically changed the country’s constitution. A legal presumption that governments are elected for five full years will seem extraordinary — possibly insane — if the coming election yields a result even less decisive than in 2010, and produces a coalition that is much shakier than the present one.
Five years is a long time in politics. A party can pack a lot of feuding and confusion into such a stretch. And every minor episode is inflated far beyond its true significance by media in a near-permanent state of digital arousal.
Tim Bale’s achievement in “Five Year Mission” is to have mapped every twist in Miliband’s journey without getting lost in the labyrinth or distracted by the flares of phoney war shooting up daily from the Westminster trenches. His appraisal is at the harsh end of fair. He is blunt in cataloguing the failures (of presentation, policy and planning) but not ungenerous in setting that performance in context.
He is mindful throughout that the mission of the book’s title — restoring Labour to power after just one term in opposition — would be a defiance of historical precedent and a challenge for even a supremely charismatic leader enjoying the unalloyed acclaim of a united party.
Miliband is not so blessed. His leadership had a difficult delivery and went straight into intensive care. Supporters of elder brother David saw it as a fratricidal putsch that condemned the party to a long period of unelectable opposition. That interpretation tinted the lens through which most media reported the outcome. It has remained a dominant theme, despite the younger Miliband’s stubborn capacity to stay in contention. He has managed it through a curious leadership dance combining many small tactical steps and a few dramatic leaps: attacking Rupert Murdoch over phone hacking ; denouncing “predatory” capitalism; pledging to freeze energy bills; voting down military intervention in Syria.
Some developments were meticulously organised, others spontaneous. The proportion of principle and opportunism in each one is the subject of ongoing debate inside the party. The sympathetic view is that Miliband’s more luminescent moments revealed the courageous streak that first motivated him to seek the leadership — a radical ambition to break the New Labour habit of cringing before the orthodoxies of conservatism.
The sceptical take is that Miliband’s spasmodic style expressed an impulse to shore up the party’s core support on the left that conflicted with his propensity for ultra-cautious manoeuvring, acquired as an apprentice in Gordon Brown’s Treasury.
Bale does not choose explicitly between those interpretations but he does quote more liberally from commentators who applied the cynical gloss. There is little doubting the honest motivation behind Miliband’s project, but what was planned as a crusade ends up looking like a siege.
The story that the leader wants to tell about himself as the architect of a fairer, more equal society has been drowned out by the stories his enemies would rather tell of a deluded usurper defending his crown in unfocused skirmishes. Perhaps Bale wanted to cite more Miliband cheerleaders and couldn’t find them. There has been no cadre of approving commentators and, for most of the parliament, no praetorian guard of Milibandite MPs ready to take to the airwaves in moments of crisis.
Hostile reviews and dismal personal poll ratings have been one of the few constants in a volatile half-decade. Bale notes in his conclusion that the Conservative party might well have defenestrated a leader whose public image plumbed equivalent depths. But Labour’s rulebook and its culture are less amenable to ad hoc leadership challenges. It has made do instead with anonymous sniping from the sidelines.
Besides, for most of the parliament, Labour had enough of a lead for Miliband’s critics to think power might be within reach anyway, in spite of the leader. Partly that advantage was down to the one-off bounty of left-leaning, former Lib Dem voters, gift-wrapped for Labour by Nick Clegg’s decision to go into coalition with the Tories. The other crucial factor was George Osborne’s disastrous 2012 budget — the “omnishambles”.
The combination of fiddly initiatives that unravelled under scrutiny and the cut in the top tax rate paid by the very richest, reinforcing perceptions of the Tories as a club for millionaires, propelled Labour to a 10-point lead and muted Miliband’s critics.
Bale channels a view I have also heard from Labour and Tory MPs that history may judge the “omnishambles” to have been Osborne’s greatest triumph (albeit unintentional). It lulled the opposition into complacency for just long enough to put Miliband’s leadership beyond challenge. (Besides, as Bale also notes, there was no ready alternative who might confidently have been expected to do better.)
The cruellest way to judge Miliband is to test his performance against some ideal leader who would have united the party, exploited government weakness and excited the country, all with a coherent vision of left wing renewal.
No politician passes that test. Maybe there wasn’t a quicker route back from defeat in 2010, although it is certainly true that Cameron and Osborne often made life easy for their enemies. For one thing, they failed to eliminate the budget deficit and to reverse the growth of national debt — the very tests of economic credibility they set for themselves.
As Bale says: “It is amazing that Labour has somehow allowed Cameron and his colleagues to miss so many targets and waste so much public money.” The same proposition can be put in reverse. If Miliband had been as ineffective as often portrayed, the Tories would be going into this election with an unassailable advantage. Yet it is still possible that Britain will soon have a Labour prime minister. The race is close partly because neither of the main parties has adapted to changes in the country’s temperament: the rise of an anti-establishment politics that puts a premium on candidates’ ability to channel nationalistic grievances and on their perceived distance from Westminster.
Voter flight to Ukip and the SNP will shape the outcome of the election as much as the traditional Labour-Tory dynamic. A weakness of Bale’s book is in attention to that trend. His focus is often technocratic and confined to intra-Westminster machinations.
But perhaps that is a function of his subject; the same charge can be levelled against Miliband. It is surely asking too much that a volume should encapsulate absolutely everything that has happened in five years in politics and still weave it into a coherent story. To have covered most things is impressive enough, especially when the author could not say for sure that the impossible mission wouldn’t be accomplished.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
