The Spectator’s Notes | 1 October 2011

No opposition leader’s party conference speech is complete without a ‘This is who I am’ passage. On Tuesday, Ed Miliband said that, because of his family’s background as refugees from Hitler, he had ‘the heritage of the outsider’, but because of his own career, he had ‘the vantage point of the insider’. I wonder if this attempt to provide an autobiographical ‘narrative’ helps as much as people think. The truth about modern politics is that almost all its main practitioners have attained their positions only by devoting their entire adult lives to it. No war or hardship or business success, no experience of a profession or a farm or a factory has touched them. When they tell their ‘story’, they only expose how little of it there really is. They talk about the virtues and values (that word endlessly repeated) of ‘the British people’ with the enthusiasm and ignorance of tourists.