New labour

The leadership duo of Ed and Ed made an appearance this morning to rev up support for Labour ahead of this week’s elections. Today was all about appealing to those who have felt hard done by the government and want something different, whatever it may be. Miliband concentrated on setting out five ‘priorities’ for next week’s Queen’s Speech — the sorts of policies that, he claims, Labour would be enacting in government, and which we’ve heard from him before. Balls meanwhile was in full attack mode, deploying the usual buzz words and phrases, such as ‘alternative’, ‘fair’ and ‘Robin Hood tax’ to back up Miliband. The duo were in fine

The most curious thing about David Miliband’s article for the latest New Statesman — which is causing quite a stir this morning — is that it should appear now. After all, the Roy Hattersley essay that it purports to be responding to was published, so far as I can tell, last September. That’s five months ago. Which is fine, if it’s really taken MiliMajor that long to get around to it. But it certainly fuels the idea that he has chosen now, this moment, to make a political intervention — and Hattersley is just an excuse. And the intervention itself? Basically, Miliband warns against what he calls ‘Reassurance Labour’, a

The Labour Conference 2011 has turned into a horrible misery-fest. What a daft idea to make the theme of the conference: “We’re really sorry, we won’t do it again”. At least it’s not the slogan, although it would have been more honest than “Fulfilling the Promise of Britain”. I agree with Steve Richards in the Independent that the pessimism is self-fulfilling. This does not feel like a platform for re-election I spent most of the New Labour era criticising Tony Blair and his government. I thought he was too cosy with the ultra-rich, cynical about criminal justice policy, disingenuous about the use of the private sector in providing public services

Global events may soon relegate Labour conference to the News in Brief sections of newspapers, especially as it appears that G20 finance ministers are preparing for Greece to default and for contagion to spread to other parts of the Eurozone. So, the Labour leader has wasted no time as Labour conference opens. In interviews with the Observer and the Sunday Mirror, he revives his tactic of presenting himself as an insurgent, the man to “rip up the rulebook”. He makes a pledge or two: the headline grabbing idea is a cap tuition fees at £6,000 per year, paid for by reversing a planned corporation tax cut on the hated banks. This blatant

Almost exactly a year ago, Tony Blair’s memoirs wafted into bookshops to cause a stir ahead of conference season. Now it it seems that Alistair Darling’s, due out next Wednesday, will do exactly the same. Judging by the extracts published over at Labour Uncut, the quiet man of the last Labour government will splash his simmering frustrations and enmities right across the page. Gordon Brown, he will say, became increasingly “brutal and volcanic”. Mervyn King was “amazingly stubborn and exasperating”. And Ed Balls and Shriti Vadhera will be accused of “running what amounted to a shadow treasury operation within government”. But the most eyecatching revelation, and perhaps the one with

Gordon Brown graced the political stage with a rare cameo this week – if half an hour of deluded invective masquerading as reasoned piety qualifies as a cameo. Brown would have you believe that he had nothing to do with Rupert Murdoch. This following piece by Peter Oborne says otherwise.   The murderous intent of Gordon Brown, Peter Oborne, 20 April 2002 This Friday a triumphant Gordon Brown flies to New York for a business conference. The Chancellor and his colleagues perhaps see the trip as a well-earned break.   In No.10 Downing Street there is a temptation to take a more jaundiced view, and interpret it as a quick

Gordon Brown’s speech in the House of Commons just now was remarkable. It was completely deluded, one of the most one-sided versions of history you’re ever likely to hear. Abetted by the Speaker, Brown spoke for what must have been at least half an hour trying to justify his record in office and depict himself as someone who was prepared to take on the Murdoch empire, which he certainly was not while News International was supporting Labour. Rather than acknowledging—as Ed Miliband and Peter Mandelson have—, that Labour got far too close to News International and was too scared of it, he presented an entirely self-serving version of history. To

“It’s like Blair and Brown — but without the acrimony.” So sayeth one Cabinet Office source, describing the prolonged build-up to today’s public services White Paper to me a couple of months ago. His point was that, although the yellow and blue halves of the Downing Street operation are genuinely chummy with one another, their differences can still put a block on reform. In his story, the Tories are like Blair, striving to go further, faster, stronger. Whereas the Lib Dems can occasionally stand in the way. So what has been blocked from the White Paper? Listening to David Cameron today, you wouldn’t guess that anything has been. “Let me

It has been a turbulent, ol’ week for Ed Miliband — all the way from those Ed Balls files, through his most substantial speech so far, to that bruising Twitter appearance. By way of putting a full-stop to it all, here’s an interview that our deputy editor, Mary Wakefield, conducted with him in 2007. This is MiliMinor, aged 37, and relatively carefree:  The charm of Ed Miliband, Mary Wakefield, The Spectator, 2 June 2007 Sitting opposite Ed Miliband MP in a large and airy office, the sort of office that befits the Minister for the Third Sector, I suddenly have the surreal impression that I’m at the doctor’s. It’s the

According to the Observer, and a slew of other papers, “senior Labour figures are believed to have put their leader on a timer to ‘up his game’ in the next few months if he is to avoid a full-blown leadership crisis later this year.” Which reminded me of all this: 20 April, 2008 “The Prime Minister, who is battling a growing rebellion over his abolition of the 10p tax rate, has been given until the end of the summer to turn things round by backbenchers angry at a string of image and policy failures.” (here) 24 May, 2008 “It is that Mr Brown be given until the end of July

The Telegraph’s publication of all those documents today has got everyone talking about that feud again. Here is what The Spectator’s former editor Matthew d’Ancona had to say about the Blair-Brown wars when things were hotting up in the autumn of 2006: The great New Labour civil war, Matthew d’Ancona, 6 September 2006 Two days before David Cameron was elected Conservative leader, I asked one of his closest allies what the founding principle of Cameronism would be. He pondered the question. Would it, I wondered, be something to do with quality of life, the public services, the environment, social justice, nationhood? ‘Our starting point,’ he finally replied, ‘is that the

The Labour Party is still ambling in the wilderness – sure of its destination, but uncertain of the route. Its response to last year’s general election defeat has been silence, publicly at least. In the privacy of debating chambers however, the party is charting its potential renewal. These circles murmur that ‘the state has reached its limits’; or, in other words, that Fabianism, the dominant force in the post-war Labour movement, has been tested to destruction. Philip Collins touches on this in his must-read column for the Times today (£): ‘Since the general election defeat, the only intellectual life in the party has come from blue Labour, an intriguing set