The man who was not leader is a most engaging speaker. Articulate and
passionate, he holds you with his eyes, almost leaning into his words, and
gesticulating expansively to emphasise them.
David Miliband, the Environment Secretary and will-he-won’t-he challenger to
Gordon Brown, is also a most frustrating speaker. Gripped though one feels
as he talks, when the sentence ends, the spell is broken. It is a measure of
the difficulty of quite pinning down Mr Miliband, that his meaning seems to
slip out of one’s grasp as soon as the eye turns away and the voice fades.
It does not help that much of what Mr Miliband says is that he does not want
to say anything about that. He did not want to talk about “what ifs”, he did
not want to talk about anything remotely personal either to him or to David
Cameron. And he most definitely did not want to talk about his relationship
with his younger brother, Ed, who is expected to be propelled into the
Cabinet by Gordon Brown: “I don’t know how interesting it is.”
Very, actually. “Is it? Oh dear. Er, what can we do about that?”
Here is another interesting question: do you think you would have had more
influence if you had stood for party leader against Mr Brown?
“No.” Why? “Because it wouldn’t have been the right thing to do, and if you
don’t do the right thing, then – well, if you don’t do the right thing
you’ve done the wrong thing, so . . . er . . .” Hmm. What Mr Miliband did
want to talk about was the direction of new Labour over the next ten years;
the development of his “I can” political philosophy. Let us give him some
space.
“From my point of view, the theme of the political renewal that we have to do
as a party is, to put it in simplistic terms: the 1945 Government was
satisfying people saying ‘I need’. I need housing, I need education, I need
healthcare. That brought forward a particular response from government. [In]
the 1980s the defining ethos was ‘I want’, and it was about consumerism. For
me, the 2010s, the defining ethos is ‘I can’. And you see that in everything
from blogging to Facebook to direct payments to disabled people.”
Why does Mr Miliband feel the need to offer Mr Brown tips on winning the next
election if he is, as he insists he is, completely delighted with the way
the leadership campaign is going? “We are on a political journey to define
postBlair politics in a way that carries on the fundamental and brilliant
insights that defined new Labour from ’94 to 2007 and we have got to carry
that forward. And that involves engaging with people. You cannot say you
believe in a new sort of politics and, by the way, I have had all these
brilliant ideas, but I am not going to tell you what they are and no one can
talk to me about them.”
He then tried to make the difficult case that he could speak more freely now
than he could if he had been a leadership candidate. “There is a freedom
that comes from not running for election for anything. So if you cannot say
what you think when you are not running for election then, er, you know . .
.”
There is a lot of this trailing off. It is partly a product of enthusiasm;
instead of ending a thought he is constantly looking for the next one to
link it with. It lends him an air of uncertainty, as did the long, teasing
period during which he refused to rule out his bid for the leadership. Here
are some of the things he did not answer.
Q: What happens if the way the leadership develops does not go as far as
you would like?
A: “Hypotheticals are always dangerous.”
Q: What do you think about the Tory idea of using David Cameron [a year
younger than Mr Miliband, and also with a young family], his children, his
wind turbine, somehow to embody the change?
A: “Well, I am not going to get into . . . he has got to make his own choices
about the balance between public and private life.”
Q: Assuming you win the election, do you think Gordon will serve a full
term?
A: “Oh, I am not going to get into . . . look, he should serve as long as he
likes. You know, he has not been installed yet. You do not have to talk
about when he is going to go.”
Q: Why not?
A: “Because it is so much more interesting to talk about what we need to do
rather than when he may go . . . he should stay as long as he wants and I .
. . I am not thinking about how long he is going to be there, for goodness
sake, so it cannot be that, you know, it is not that important. It is not!”
Q: How did you fare at school?
A: “I was not good at physics.”
That final, partial answer hid an interesting fact: the man nicknamed Brains
by Alastair Campbell when he was head of policy at No 10, got three Bs and a
D at his London comprehensive. Did he believe, we wondered, that he would
have done better at a private school?
“I don’t know, I don’t know.” What did Ed get in his A levels? “He did better
than I did.” This answer came swiftly and surely. It was a rare moment of
clarity in a tortuous discussion of the relationship, due to become more and
more fascinating, between David and Ed, a close adviser to Mr Brown and a
junior charities minister.
Mr Miliband gave up trying not to answer, and took refuge in saying “I don’t
know” a lot; one response has him saying it three times, consecutively. He
looked by turns amused, alarmed and annoyed.
What we know is that Ed, 37, and David, 41, are the only children of Ralph
Miliband, the late Marxist academic who fled the Nazis on the last boat to
England from Belgium. Something about conditions in their North London home
made it the ideal breeding ground for new Labour politicians: Ed followed
David to Oxford and then into politics, and is now ready to stop being
David’s junior.
Given Ed’s closeness to Mr Brown they could soon become the first full
brothers ever to serve in a Labour Cabinet. The Ed ’n’ Dave show, the
Miliband ministers, could be a fascinating political soap opera, we
suggested.
“Oh God,” Mr Miliband said, laughing.
What was it about their upbringing that led them to take such a similar path?
Nature, nurture? “Circumstance as well. I mean, er, I don’t know, really. I
am not very good at psycho-stuff. I am not very good at looking backwards
so, erm . . . don’t have that much time, either. You will have to give me
prior notice. I will have to do some research.”
The brothers are very close: “We are closer now than we have ever been,
actually.” They have, however, made a pact never to do joint interviews. Is
there a gentle rivalry between them? “I would say that I have gentle pride
in his achievements.”
Would he still feel as proud if Ed were to develop as a potential rival to
him? Could David foresee a time when he and Ed were even rivals for the
leadership? “That is not what I am spending my time thinking about, I can
absolutely assure you. We have just managed to clear out the debris of this
nonleadership election or nonleadership campaign.”
Do they have political differences? “We discuss things. It would be ridiculous
if I said to you we are pre-programmed to have totally the same views, but I
am not going to put them into easy compartments.”
What of the idea that Ed is more . . . but here Mr Miliband interrupted. “More
clubbable, more handsome, more . . .”
No, we were going to say more of a Brownite. “Look, he has worked for Gordon
for ten years and done a brilliant job in that,” he said. “In the end we are
shaped by our circumstances and people can make their judgment about us from
what we say and do.”
He was a lot more certain, and engagingly enthusiastic, about his childhood
ambition: “I wanted to be a bus conductor. My ambition, because London bus
conductors had those fantastic things that they wore round their necks and
then you sort of wound up this little handle and then it sort of went
ptchoom, and it came out the front in a great, long thing . . .”
It could almost be a description of the way Mr Miliband thinks aloud. Perhaps
the most telling thing about a fascinating hour with the boy who would not
be king (yet), is that as soon as we shut the door behind us, we could not
quite remember anything that he had said.
CV
David Wright Miliband Born 15 July 1965, son of Ralph and Marion, née
Kozak.
Married 1998 violinist Louise Shackleton; one adopted son
Educated Haverstock School, North London; Corpus Christi College,
Oxford; Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Career Fellow, Institute for Public Policy Research, 1989–94; head of
policy, Office of Leader of the Opposition, 1994–97; head of policy Prime
Minister’s Policy Unit, 1997-2001; MP South Shields 2001- ; Education
minister 2002–04; Cabinet Office, 2004–05; Minister for Communities and
Local Government 2005–06; Environment Secretary 2006-
Sounds to me like the problem was not with the interviewee but the interviewers, who seemed more interested in trying to provoke divisive personal remarks than in understanding any worthwhile isue. It is the kind of shallow, gossipy, celeb-culture interviewing approach that gives journalism a bad name. Let's have some serious, informative and insightful interviewing, please.
Anuradha Vittachi, Chinnor, Oxon
Now let me see, speaking but saying nothing. Mmmmm.........a perfect candidate for Prime Minister?
judy, Liverpool, england