The Spectator’s Notes | 2 October 2010

The Spectator’s Notes

It is surprising that the Cameron camp is so pleased that it was Ed, not David. Miliband ma does, indeed, have the more centrist politics of the two, but it was clear from Ed’s speech to his conference on Tuesday that he has a freedom which his big brother would have lacked. There is a great demand at present for a moral vision which attacks globalisation (he was artful to relate immigration to this), bankers, deregulation, the Iraq war. For Labour, these attacks are ways of getting out from under the weight of the later Blair/Brown years — hence Mr Miliband’s disparagement of ‘the company we kept’. I thought his approach was, at bottom, sentimental, and can be exposed as such. But, at a time of crisis both of money and ‘values’, it has some appeal. It also has a chance of making people doubt Mr Cameron’s own ‘We’re all in this together’ sincerity.