The Sniping and Self-Pity of a Truly Feeble Man

Matthew Norman writes:

British history offers a precedent for a craven, emotionally enfeebled chap called David being supplanted by a younger brother with a public speaking problem. The sadness for Ed Miliband – apart from having no Lionel Logue – is that, unlike George VI, he cannot exile his sibling to foreign parts for the rest of his days (though how dashingly nerdsome this David would look in a Governor of Bermuda’s hat!).

This week, Milibandroid the Elder has mostly been playing Knock Down Ginger, and the sense of déjà vu is overwhelming. It never varies. He charges up to the door and boldly rings the bell, but at the first sound of footsteps from within, he scuttles away and hides in the bushes sucking his thumb.

The pattern was set in the summer of 2008, when David wrote a barely coded article in the Guardian – well, it wouldn’t have taxed the folk at Bletchley Park – justly lacerating Gordon Brown. The moment it was greeted as the challenge to the PM’s authority that it certainly was, off he scarpered, denying any such intent.

Within a year, his close friend and Cabinet ally James Purnell resigned, laying the ground for David to oust Mr Brown by doing the same. Again he bottled it, and stayed. Now, the former foreign secretary has exposed that giant, banana-coloured streak for a third time, by way of an article in the New Statesman, and his response to the reaction it inevitably provoked.

But before we come to that, a word of praise to him for hewing the time from the ever-lengthening roster of commercial endeavours (a football club directorship, public speaking abroad, advising venture capitalists) that is earning him a reputed £500,000 per annum; a half-million which this strong advocate of a mansion tax reportedly channels through a private company in the way that is familiar to those seeking – entirely legally – to avoid paying income tax. Nothing wrong there. If being Baby Blair means anything, it means earning oodles from the contacts book and espousing the ancient Labour ideal that limiting tax liability is for the many, not the few.

Nor can David be blamed if the thrust of his argument in the New Statesman about the dangers of his party becoming “Reassurance Labour” defeated me. That is my fault. I did once book a night course in the pidgin dialect of Blairspeak that is David’s first and only tongue, but the crucial introductory lesson clashed with a Champions League game on telly, and a choice had to be made. However, I have run it through a Milibandroid-English dictionary, and can reveal that it translates, as follows: “Ed stinks, and it should have been me, me, me, me, meeeeeeeee.”

Returning to the original text, it is entirely predictable that the Labour figure whom David notionally attacks, for being too Lefty, is not his brother. The nominal target of this “comradely” rebuke is Roy Hattersley, whose central relevance to the current political scene no one would deny. Once again, the Enigma machine is not needed to decrypt this effort as a full frontal attack on the leader. Nevertheless, formal confirmation came yesterday, when “friends of David” claimed that undermining his brother was the last thing on his mind. In the New Labour glory days in which David seeks sanctuary from reality, under the mannerly dominion of Alastair Campbell, nothing was officially confirmed until it was categorically denied.

Somewhere in all the soporific verbiage, modelled on a half-understood University of Southern California management-speak course in 1987, something else was apparent. Whatever one thinks of Ed Miliband’s leadership (for the record, I belong to an elite corps of lukewarm admirers), David would have been much, much worse. Like the bad general of cliché, he can only fight the last war. He clings for comfort to the tenets of triangulation that had been rumbled by 2005, when Mr Blair was re-elected on a dismal 36 per cent of the national vote.

Little Ed may have lethal presentational problems, but he also has guts. When he wanted the leadership, he rang the doorbell and charged into the house, even though it meant trampling over his poor old mum’s heart. David, no lavishly gifted communicator himself, is a castrato. He is the countertenor in the Labour choir, singing a self-pitying requiem to the death of personal ambition at a pitch to shatter glass.

In this fraternal battle royal, there never was a rule of primogeniture. Combat politics, as Bette Davis said of growing old, ain’t for sissies. If this mincing paean to metrosexual narcissism cannot get over his defeat, and knuckle down to fighting from within the shadow cabinet for whatever social democratic beliefs he claims to hold, that is his choice. It may be a betrayal of the movement he affects to serve. The averagely lachrymose 16-year-old X Factor reject may handle defeat with far more grace and maturity. And it may rankle that we taxpayers are obliged to supplement a political dilettante’s colossal income. But these are the rules, and he may play by them if he wishes.

In short, by all means let this snivelling poltroon of a fallen princeling stuff his pockets to his heart’s content, while popping along to the House of Commons every once in a while to sob into his nosegay over a crashing sense of entitlement denied. But, Lord above, let him be guided by the example of the Duke of Windsor through his long years of exile, and do it quietly. From this David, a period of silence would be most welcome – and if it didn’t end until Doomsday, that would be far too soon.