To the relief of the Ed Miliband camp, the widely trailed “brush-by” with Barack Obama went smoothly. Where “Five Snubs” Gordon Brown had to settle for an encounter in a United Nations kitchen, his successor got 25 minutes to discuss what a spokesperson called “issues including the situation in Ukraine, Gaza and the future of the EU the economy, climate change and the approaching referendum in Scotland”.
With that facility for speed statesmanship, it would hardly have seemed surprising if the two leaders had also ruminated on Rory McIlroy’s win in the British Open and whether Nick Clegg was wise to cook an avocado cake for daytime television. To complete the euphoria, the three-day Labour policy forum launched by Miliband before he left for the US had concluded, with activists and union leaders meekly signing up to a half-hatched manifesto ranging from deficit-cutting to the future of the railways. If Miliband is congratulating himself on victories at home and away, he should think again. As parliament breaks for the summer recess, senior Labour figures worry that victory is slipping from the leader’s grasp. “He is no longer the favourite to win,” says one. Far from adding up to a show of political mastery, Miliband’s foreign and domestic breakthroughs have illustrated the weaknesses that could prove lethal.
Take the policy forum first. This, voters were assured, was a cathartic moment, described by the policy chief, Jon Cruddas, as “a turning point in the history of the Labour Party”. His redesign of social democracy, which hands money and power back to cities, communities and people, is less bold than he might have wished. Even so, it is a victory of courage over mediocrity and a personal triumph for Cruddas. But who was to know? Labour’s “New Deal for England” received such scant publicity that Cruddas might have expected better coverage had he won the giant marrow competition at a village fete. “The only story was that there was no story,” says one senior figure unconnected to the policy review.
Even given that Labour’s direction-setting forums tend to be conducted in the furtive manner of a German sausage manufacturers’ price-fixing cartel, the party’s publicists fumbled at what should have been a major moment. The suspicion is that they did so because unity and frugality are the only messages that matter. If the chloroform of caution hangs over domestic issues, then it has all but smothered foreign policy. Once on US soil, Miliband told a Washington correspondent that Her Majesty’s Opposition “opposes the Israeli incursion into Gaza”. Warning Israel that the escalation of violence would win it few friends, he said that he could not “explain, justify or defend the horrifying deaths of hundreds of Palestinians”. Many, me among them, would echo Miliband’s sentiments. The puzzle is why he had not spoken out so stridently on home turf when the slaughter began. Even before bombs scythed through a hospital, killing five people, the sight of a father carrying his baby’s torn body in a plastic bag should have prompted any Labour leader to denounce Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unjustifiable methods. Miliband, however, is not just any Labour leader.
Yet he, a father himself and a man whose parents fled from terror, barely uttered a rebuke until he had the White House in his sights. That oversight is part of a pattern that began when Labour, to the fury of some frontbenchers, sided with Prime Minister Cameron in promising, following a lost vote, that the Syrian conflict would not be considered by parliament again.
The upshot is that Syria, deemed a non-issue, may tear itself apart as strategists wash their white hands of strangers’ blood. Given the party’s recent history, 25 minutes with the US president was more than ample to discuss Labour’s foreign policy. “We haven’t got one,” says a senior source. Yet Miliband is a thoughtful leader who cares about the lives of others and whose hesitancy is driven not by callousness but by caution. Perversely, fear of rippling the surface of his hard-won party unity is widening fissures within the party. As well as old gripes (the small but consistent Dump-Ed-Balls lobby has been emboldened by the PM’s ruthlessness in ditching his good friend, Michael Gove), fingers are pointing at the shadow foreign secretary and campaign chief, Douglas Alexander. “One of the cleverest men in politics,” says one senior figure. “But risk averse and too controlling.”
Quite how the contrasting approaches of Alexander and Cruddas will play out in the domestic arena is unclear. On foreign policy, however, neither Alexander nor Lord (Stewart) Wood, Miliband’s most trusted adviser, can be held responsible for the leader’s apparent inertia. Some senior lieutenants say he now cuts a lonely figure, still suffering from the absence of his older brother, who protected and counselled him in the many hours they once spent in conclave. Few think or even hope that David Miliband will ever return to front-line British politics, but his name is mentioned again because the Gazan war and the Malaysian air disaster are a reminder of how he punched above his weight on the foreign stage. For all the black marks against him (Iraq and renditions, not to mention the high-handed manner that lost him the leadership), no one who sat through meetings with the older Miliband in Kabul or walked with him through the Gazan rubble could fail to note his stature in the days when Labour could still hope to influence world events.
“Where are our principles now?” says one frontbencher. “Tony Blair’s thinking may be wrong, but we have found nothing to replace it.” Possibly the grimmest omen for Miliband, as parliament rises, is the adulation offered to Blair after a London speech last week. Labour’s Blair-shaped vacuum is, in many ways, a puzzle. Miliband has achieved more than many imagined possible in binding his party together and assembling a bold agenda. To paraphrase Pirandello, the Labour offer may still resemble six policies in search of a story. The real missing ingredient, however, is the maverick quality indispensable to any national leader.
Miliband joked at a recent Labour fundraiser about how he was the school bad boy, hiding out behind the bike sheds “playing chess or doing Rubik’s cube”. But risk aversion is not funny. Nor is “Leave it to the Tories” a fit foreign policy, especially when a government poised to abandon the European Union talks of ripping up human-rights obligations that have rarely looked more vital. Miliband had no need to go to Washington to learn a lesson evident in the beach novels and children’s games strewn over a Ukrainian sunflower field after the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner.
This heap of broken images should warn him that he must quickly find the public voice of a prime minister-in-waiting or risk ceding all hopes of a Labour victory. Should he shirk the challenge, in the year that family life was sucked into the vortex of global war, then his epitaph would be a damning one: That he proved too small a figure for this perilous age.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2014
