You Can't Get The Staff

Or, at any rate, Ed Miliband can't.

The glorified gossip columnists of "political journalism", with their total lack of interest in policy or philosophy, have no idea what to make of One Nation Labour, and have been demonstrating all over the place that they are historically illiterate by droning on that Miliband's invocation of Disraeli is somehow "cross-dressing".

Next to none comes from One Nation backgrounds in the middle and working classes, and they will certainly have learned nothing about it from any academic course of Politics. At best, any mention of it there would be termed "revisionist" rather than simply factual and the only key to understanding the Labour Movement.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party's own paid staff is made up very heavily indeed of people who have come across One Nation Labour, at least since coming into that employ even if never before then, and who define their entire mission in life as being the suppression of that tradition.

Using the standard definition of "right-wing" in terms of Gladstonian global utopianism both capitalist economically and, in that cause, interventionist militarily, these people's hero, David Miliband, would have been by far the most right-wing Leader of any major party since well before the War, and at least arguably since well before the twentieth century.

Whereas Ed Miliband promises in his Leader's Speech to repeal the corrupt and corrupting NHS Bill, his brother wrote that Bill word-for-word when he was running Tony Blair's Policy Unit, as he did almost the entire Coalition programme, itself an imposition of the utterly Gladstonian contents of The Orange Book under the name "The Coalition Agreement", for which no more than a quarter of delegates had ever been persuaded to vote at any Liberal Democrat Conference. Such in the nature to which this country was subjected in May 2010.

But that coup had been planned in detail a decade or more earlier by Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell (said to be looking for a seat), the five figures who would have been in Cabinet instead of the Lib Dems if Cameron had won an overall majority (Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers, Peter Mandelson, James Purnell and Andrew Adonis), and the Leader of the "Opposition" who would have been attending the Cameron Cabinet if everything had gone according to plan, David Miliband.

But they were frustrated by Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. Otherwise, the whole privatisation and cuts programme, with its attendant wars abroad and assaults on civil liberties at home, would have happened, as only too much of it did, 10 years ago and more. It would all have been very firmly entrenched indeed by now.

Yet it is to that, and to its principal architect and apologist, that the Labour Party's paid staff very often continues to feel fealty. The London Regional Office campaigned openly for Boris Johnson, and therefore, not that it has to, has still yet to notify Dan Hodges of his ipso facto expulsion for having done the same thing.

Are matters different up here? Perhaps. But I should take an awful lot of convincing. And I am not the only one. I only have to think of the party staffer best known to me in these parts. He has probably not read Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory, written by someone who had been in the year below him at school and who had been instrumental in first co-opting him onto a Parish Council. He would certainly never admit to having done so, still less to agreeing with any of it.

Yet, in his heart of hearts, he probably would agree with about as much of it as that with which he would disagree. But he has spent 15 years defining himself against every word lately collected therein. A party in which the tendency recently organised as Blue Labour rules in benign coalition with what used to be called the Soft Left would probably suit the real views of a man halfway between the two.

But he has invested too much in an allegiance to everything to which they are both opposed, to everything that defines itself against them both. And, as the world turns, precisely that is why he will never now be an MP, but, being the same age as I am, can probably look forward to another 35 years of putting the kettle on. He is not the only one. There is also, if perhaps to a lesser extent, the central Labour Party staffer whom I know best, who was already a PhD by the time that he ever joined the party, and who took an awful lot of convincing to vote Labour at all when he and I were both postgrads, though no longer housemates, in 2001. Among many others, no doubt.