Ed miliband

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Speak human

The next Labour leader will have to be able to speak human, said a piece in the Observer. This, it argued, is because Ed Miliband was taunted for always speaking like a policy wonk. What short memories members of the commentariat have. In 2010 Ed Miliband was being praised by supporters on the grounds that he did ‘speak human’, unlike his technocratic brother. ‘Let us be clear: Ed M is not JFK,’ wrote Mehdi Hasan in the New Statesman in that year. ‘But he does have the all-important ability to connect with ordinary people.’ He quoted Neil Kinnock, of all people to prove it. Lord Kinnock said Ed had the

Steerpike Steerpike

Ed Balls hired by Harvard to ‘research financial stability’

During the election, Ed Miliband’s opponents regularly criticised the Labour leader for naming his life experience outside the Westminster bubble as ‘teaching at Harvard’. Still, the naysayers haven’t put his former sidekick Ed Balls off returning to the university he once studied at. Today the ousted Labour MP has confirmed reports that he is joining the Ivy League establishment as a senior fellow. In a statement John Haigh, the executive Dean of the Kennedy School, announced the appointment: ‘We’re delighted to welcome Ed Balls to the Mossavar-Rahmani business and government centre. Ed brings enormous depth and breadth of experience in the public sector and we’re confident he will make a valuable contribution to our students, to the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Does Labour still not get it?

You wait ages for a Labour leadership contest, then five come along at once. In the past few days, nominations have closed for the contests to be leader and deputy leader of the UK and Scottish Labour parties respectively as well as on the party’s pick for London mayor. Who wins these races will determine how Labour defines itself in opposition and how quickly it can regain power. Labour is in the dire position of being out of office at UK level, at national level in Scotland and at city level in the capital. Labour should be taking a long, hard look at itself before deciding what to do next.

Robert Philpot

Imposter syndrome

As graduates of the country’s best university, most former Cambridge students neither seek nor expect much in the way of public sympathy. Last weekend, however, the frontrunner in the Labour leadership contest, Andy Burnham, attempted to elicit a little. Describing his journey from a Merseyside comprehensive to Cambridge as the thing which ‘brought me into politics’, he told of his bewilderment when, as a prospective English student, he was asked at his interview, ‘Do you see a parallel between The Canterbury Tales and modern package holidays?’ He was, he said, ‘still pondering what the question meant when I arrived at Warrington station six hours later and when the rejection letter

Monday

Julia Hartley-Brewer

Jeremy Corbyn is definitely not what Labour voters want

The clock struck noon and it was if the past 32 years had never happened. Veteran Left-wing MP Jeremy Corbyn had, with seconds to spare, got the necessary 35 nominations to win his place on the Labour leadership ballot. And with that news, it became clear that the Labour party has not just failed to learn the lessons of last month’s election failure; they are still too busy ignoring the lessons of 1983. In that year, one of the party’s most traumatic defeats in its history, the British people voted en masse to reject Michael Foot and his socialist manifesto – famously dubbed ‘the longest suicide note in history’. Today,

Steerpike Steerpike

Lesley Garrett: Labour chose the wrong Miliband brother

As a Doncaster resident, Lesley Garrett is well acquainted with her local MP Ed Miliband. However, the soprano was left disappointed by Labour’s effort in the general election. In an interview ahead of her performance in Garsington Opera’s production of Così fan tutte, Garrett — who is a loyal Labour supporter — blamed their election defeat in part on the party choosing the wrong Miliband brother to lead the party: ‘Yes. I think most people do. I think his brother had more experience, and a more authoritative voice. I think Ed was very good at what he did, and I think the two of them together would have been unstoppable. My big sorrow is that they

Friday

Steerpike

Jonathan Aitken says farewell to Alan Rusbridger

Sore heads over at the Guardian this morning after yet another leaving party for Alan Rusbridger. In what Mr S makes to be Rusbridger’s third leaving do, politicians and celebrities gathered at the Battlebridge Room of Kings Place to raise a glass to the departed editor. Ed Miliband chatted away to Benedict Cumberbatch over a bottle of Sol, while Chuka Umunna and Harriet Harman tucked into the prosecco. No sign of any of the Labour leadership contenders, but a smattering of Tories were in attendance, including Lord Grade and David Davis. Perhaps the most surprising appearance was from Jonathan Aitken – after all, it was Rusbridger’s dogged pursuit of the disgraced former Tory MP

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Ed’s campaign was fine. The problem is his party

Patrick Wintour is one of the best political editors around. For the Guardian he’s been for decades a cool and well-sourced voice: even-handed, informed, interesting but in the best sense dry. So when I heard he’d written the most comprehensive behind-the-scenes account yet of Labour’s failed general election campaign I hurried to read it. I was not disappointed. ‘The undoing of Ed Miliband, and how Labour lost the election’ is an insider account of a chapter of accidents, starting with Mr Miliband’s memory lapse about the deficit during Labour’s last party conference. Apparently he shut himself in his hotel room afterwards and wouldn’t come out. The story takes us through to

Wednesday

Sebastian Payne

Five things we’ve learnt from The Times’ Ed Miliband investigation

The dissection of Labour’s election defeat continues with a very thorough series of pieces in today’s Times by Rachel Sylvester and Michael Savage. Describing Ed Miliband’s tenure as leader as a ‘five-year suicide note’, the articles look at the countless errors of judgment and mistakes made by both Ed Miliband and those around him over the last five years. Here are five interesting things we’ve found out. 1. Philip Gould warned Miliband not to turn away from New Labour New Labour’s renowned strategist and pollster Philip Gould warned Team Miliband early on that they were defending the wrong points of the last Labour government, including the economy: ‘Philip Gould was close to death and painfully weak with cancer but

Steerpike Steerpike

Lord Ashcroft opens bidding for the #EdStone

With the Labour party under increasing scrutiny for taking donations from the trade unions, they may have to start to rely more heavily on private donors. So it’s good news that Lord Ashcroft, the former Tory deputy chairman, is willing to help the party out financially. Ashcroft says that if Labour wish to sell the now infamous #EdStone, the 8ft high ‘policy cenotaph‘ Miliband had made to honour Labour’s election promises, he will dig deep: Should the party decide to accept, this would make Ashcroft one of the party’s biggest new donors. Given that Lakshmi Mittal, the non-dom steel tycoon who has donated £5.1 million to the party, stayed silent over Miliband’s plan to abolish non-dom status, Mr

Sebastian Payne

David Miliband is the gift that keeps on giving for the Tories

David Miliband just can’t leave his brother’s election defeat alone. After several brutally honest post-election interviews, Miliband Sr. popped up again on CNN last night to offer his harshest analysis yet on his brother’s leadership. Under Ed, David said, Labour actually went backwards: ‘What I think is important for all the candidates [to replace Ed Miliband] is to reflect on the very clear lessons of two devastating electoral defeats for the Labour party in the last five years, which have come for a very clear reason. ‘And the reason is that the public have concluded that instead of building on the strengths and remedying the weaknesses of the Blair years, the

Tuesday

Steerpike

Is this the reason Miliband forgot to mention the deficit in his conference speech?

Earlier this month Patrick Wintour wrote an in-depth profile of Ed Miliband’s failed election campaign for the Guardian. In it, he went through the different things which had gone wrong for the Labour Party in the lead up to the election. He began the piece by focussing on Miliband’s speech in September at the Labour Conference where he forgot to mention the deficit – a mistake that cost him later in the campaign. Wintour says that according to a Labour source, a late change to his speech to include Isis meant he was ‘off his game’: ‘He was not quite sure in his head where he was, so when he got to the

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Miliband’s policy chief: the party is making the same mistake as it did in 2010

Everyone in Labour is having their say about where the party went wrong in the run-up to the election. But what if it’s still making the same mistakes as it tries to elect a new leader? At a seminar on Friday on Labour’s defeat, Ed Miliband’s policy chief Jon Cruddas fretted that the way the party was running its leadership contest was giving the Tories the same advantage they were handed by the same sort of contest in 2010 He said: ‘Last time round we embarked on… a leadership election which worked through the summer and allowed our opponents to redefine the terms of debate that were locked in for

Sebastian Payne

Harriet Harman and Tristram Hunt knife Miliband in the front

The fear and loathing within Labour continues with the admission from Harriet Harman that its voters were relieved it didn’t win the election. The party’s interim leader is interviewed in the Independent this morning, claiming that voters were ‘not massively enthusiastic’ about voting Conservative but ‘settled for the devil they knew’: ‘Sometimes after an election, you get a sense that people think ‘Oh my God, that is terrible, what a disaster.’ A lot of people felt that because we got nearly 40,000 new party members who were very disappointed. But there is an even greater number of people, even though they were not enthusiastic about David Cameron or the Tories, who feel relieved that

Friday

Steerpike

Milifan turns the air blue on Daily Politics

Just in case you missed the memo, the reason Ed Miliband lost the election has now been revealed. Labour supporter and founder of the Twitter account @cooledmiliband, Richard Biggs, appeared on the Daily Politics to discuss the future of the Milifandom now their beloved leader has returned to the backbenches. Revealing his disgust at the result of the general election, Biggs declared that Miliband is simply ‘too good for this f—ing country’. An interesting take, but given the fact he turned the air blue, Mr S can’t see the Milifan being invited back by the BBC anytime soon.

Thursday

Peter Oborne

Diary – 4 June 2015

For the first time since the terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan team six years ago, a Test match side has visited Pakistan. The Zimbabwe tourists, playing at the same Lahore stadium where the attack was mounted, were greeted with wild enthusiasm. Less well reported has been the fact that a team of English cricketers (including myself and Alex Massie of this parish) has been touring the Hindu Kush. We played in Chitral, Drosh, Ayun, Kalash and Booni. In these mountain areas many of our opponents were using pads, gloves and a hard ball for the first time. Still, we were overwhelmed, rarely losing by fewer than 200 runs in

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Ed Miliband returns to the Commons as Osborne announces £3bn of more cuts

Ed Miliband has wasted little time in returning to speaking duties in the House of Commons. George Osborne came to the Chamber to announce £4.5bn of savings – made up of £3bn from non-protected departmental Budgets and £1.5bn from asset sales, including the disposal of the government’s remaining 30 per cent stake in the Royal Mail – and Miliband was in place to hear him. Once Osborne’s duel with the new shadow chancellor Chris Leslie was over, Miliband rose to speak. Unlike when he was leader of the opposition, Miliband was heard in respectful silence — Tory backbenchers, perhaps, took their cue from Osborne who declared that Miliband had earned

Sebastian Payne

Five things we’ve learnt from the Guardian’s profile of Ed Miliband’s campaign

Ed Miliband’s general election campaign was clearly dysfunctional, but now we have an insight into just how bad it was. The Guardian’s political editor Patrick Wintour has produced a fantastic long read on the undoing of Miliband, revealing the fear and loathing inside his operation. The piece is such a fascinating read it’s worth buying a copy of the paper for. If you aren’t able to make it to a newsagent, here’s a summary of the five most interesting things we’ve learnt from it. 1. The Edstone went through ten approval meetings The Edstone (pictured above) will be Miliband’s legacy. If he is remembered for nothing else, it will be for engraving his pledges onto a 8ft 6in piece of limestone. Incredibly, Wintour reveals that

Wednesday

Binita Mehta

Here’s why the Tories convinced one million BME voters to support them

One of the funnier moments of the election involved Ed Miliband assuming that a turban-wearing Sikh gentleman he met on the campaign trail would, naturally, be helping him get the Sikh vote out for Labour.  In fact, the man was a Conservative parliamentary candidate. It seemed to exemplify the extent to which Labour assumed ethnic minorities would vote for them – but all that is changing. New research from British Future shows that 1 million BME voters helped keep David Cameron in Number 10. This means that one in three minority ethnic voters supported the Tories, which is the party’s best result to date. I was brought up in a pro-Labour

Tuesday

Sebastian Payne

Team Miliband said ‘we must not underestimate Éoin Clarke’

The failings of those around Ed Miliband are numerous. From the Edstone to the interview with Russell Brand, the disconnection between Team Miliband and the real world was one of the key factors contributing to Labour’s defeat last month. But I now understand they committed a far graver crime: taking Dr. Eoin Clarke seriously. Clarke, or @LabourEoin as he is better known, spends his days tweeting poorly produced infographics about various public policy matters — mostly related to the NHS. With 42k followers, plus 25k through his ‘think tank’ @LabourLeft and 10.4k with @LabourAndy, he has a decent reach within the hard left. Although there are a group of Labour MPs who retweet