Labour leadership: The contenders

[IndianaGreen]

Labour leadership: The contenders

Two are brothers, they have an average age of 45, and viewed from a certain angle they look like the world's strangest rock band. But can one of them save Labour?

John Harris The Guardian, Saturday 4 September 2010


The five (from left) are Ed Balls, Andy ­Burnham, David ­Miliband,
Diane Abbott and Ed Miliband.
Photograph: David levene for the Guardian

It's a Thursday afternoon in one of the less splendid corners of York. David Miliband is addressing an audience of 150 or so people in a clump of Victorian buildings called the Priory Street Centre. He cuts an impressively authoritative figure, though he has a habit of talking in aphorisms that could simultaneously mean everything or nothing. One of his favourites gets crowbarred into a conversation about New Labour's fondness for treating its own members with borderline contempt. There's an idea in there somewhere, but it comes out sounding positively Alan Partridge-esque: "We've got two ears but only one mouth – we talk twice as much as we listen, but we should listen twice as much as we talk."

For the time being, Miliband still travels in a car provided by the Foreign Office, with two security staff – who, he says, will shadow him until the intelligence goes quiet enough to suggest he is no longer a terrorist target. So it is that once the York meeting is done, five of us squeeze in and make our way to a hustings in Hull.

In the car, Miliband (1/3 at Paddy Power) has a pop at some of his fellow leadership candidates for "trashing the record" and implicitly includes his brother Ed – though, despite stories about escalating fraternal tensions, he won't be drawn much further. He's more bellicose than any other candidate in defending past controversies such as market-based public service reform, and shrugs off a question about his tendency to use arcane jargon via the New Labour trick of affecting to interview himself: "Is it important to always simplify and reduce and explain more clearly? Yes. Am I going to say that intellectual thought isn't very, very important? No." He also talks, with restrained emotion, about the rare occasions when he can spend time with his two young children: "I'm probably seeing less of them now than when I was foreign secretary. Everything in my mind is directed to next Thursday, when I go on holiday."

As he says, his recent political manoeuvres have involved one very tough choice, when he passed up the job of EU foreign minister to devote himself to Labour politics – and, by implication, his bid to be leader. So, how did he feel when little brother decided to stand against him?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/sep/04/labour-leadership-contenders