Blandular Fever

Back when I was a pupil, I worked on a case with the then Head of Chambers (the Hoc”). He was a “big beast” in the Labour Party who liked to identify and sponsor promising prospects for the Party leadership – hoping, I always felt, that his ship would rise on their flood tide. As it turned out, ahead of him was power and a bitter downfall. At that point, however, Labour still had 5 years of opposition ahead of it.

One lunchtime the Senior Clerk announced that the HoC had a visitor. Into the room walked David Miliband. I probably knew more about his father than I did about him that point. I was curious though as he had a reputation, even then, as being a possible future leader. He was a Princeling. The HOC was never one for small talk so once I had said hello and my insignificance had been explained, the two politicians headed for the door. There the HoC paused, turned to me and said “I’m off to lunch. You must stay here and await my return. Do NOT go anywhere.” I nodded and waited. Time passed very slowly that afternoon. I shuttled to and from the coffee machine and watched the dusk gather. At 8:00 I risked a call to the Senior Clerk: “Exactly, how long do his lunches last?”. “I think” he replied “it would now be safe for you to assume that his Lordship is done for the day.”

18 years later and Labour is back in opposition. The tragicomic Gordon Brown is no longer leader and we are stirring ourselves to elect a replacement. That was the reason I found myself in a marquee in the playground of a local primary school as a children’s choir sang “You Lift Me Up” and selections from Coldplay. I was there to see the Princeps. He was there to answer questions in a session hosted by David Aaronovitch. The latter is a journalist who writes opinion pieces for the Times. Aaronovitch scares me. My own views so closely match his that I am desperate for him to write something I can disagree with.

David Miliband was also pretty hard to disagree with. He did not duck questions and what he said made sense. There was, however, something missing. He was uninspiring. Like Cameron and Clegg he somehow doesn’t seem quite real. As they jab their crooked fingers, all emphasis and no threat (a gesture known, I gather, as the Clinton Thumb) one finds oneself sceptically scrutinising them for a sign of a soul. It is as if they have been polished somewhere and persuaded to sing moderate words to the tune of a stirring sentiment. The cadences are there but the content isn’t. David Miliband’s words were political neutrinos: only ever weakly interacting with your heart as they washed through.

He talked about “real change for people” , or worse, “real change for real people”. He spoke about “building a new Labour movement in the constituencies” and I found myself reaching for the iPhone. They were attractive words, carefully chosen and delivered with the studied sincerity of an ambassadorial greeting but they just somehow didn’t seem real. That, depressingly, may be for the good, since that seems to be what the electorate wants (although they presently appear to want their vacuity more pronounced and mixed in with a nursery dollop of Bullingdon Club smugness).

When David Miliband spoke about the dangers that the Coalition Government posed, they were the sorts of things that worry professional politicians. He was anxious that boundary changes to constituencies would not be subject to local public enquiries. He was deeply concerned that the referendum on the alternative vote would be held on the same day as elections in Wales and Scotland thereby skewing national turnout. I’m more worried that he Government cuts are forecast to result in an additional 750 000 million unemployed public sector workers and who knows how many more in the private sector. It’s not that the things he mentioned are insignificant, it’s just that given the imminent horrors it is surprising that they are the first things to come to his mind.

The questions, whilst never hostile, were challenging. He was asked to explain why he had not tried to unseat Gordon Brown as leader. He had an answer ready but for all the gloss it had accumulated through its no doubt frequent repetition, I found it made matters worse. He was not, he told us, ready to be Prime Minister at that point. We should not forget, he reminded us, that he had only been Secretary of State for one year. “So what?” I thought “Surely the Leadership has been on your to-do list since the early nineties? And neither Clegg nor Cameron had even a minute’s experience in Government. What critical additional experience have you acquired since?”.

What it seemed to come down to in the end was his exhortation for us not to under-estimate the degree of political determination at the top of the party for Gordon Brown to take us into the election. In other words, he seemed to be saying, the senior members of the party would have hung me out to dry. That is what had happened, he told us, to James Purnell whose departure had “left the Government weaker”. He went on immodestly to say that he felt that if he had resigned that would have left the Government weaker too. This last comment exemplified an infrequent yet somehow encouraging tendency sometimes to say something arresting in its strangeness. At one point, for instance, he implored us not to forget that the “purpose of schools is to turn out British Citizens”. Is it?

At another point he picked a very polite fight with Jonah who was worried about the National Health Service database. Jonah turned out to know a great deal about the subject and promptly wiped the floor with the candidate. In David Miliband’s acknowledgement that he had been well-beaten you glimpsed a humanity that other prepared chunks of rhetoric had disguised.

One questioner referred to him as “Dave”. It was a chance for some humour. “Only two people call me that” he said “My mother and my son, if you are one of those then … er … If you are not … er …”. One felt that at that point he didn’t really know how this particular comedic riff was going to end. He went with ” … then … er .. never do it again”. I laughed; partly, at least, because it had been such an amazingly rude thing to say. Not for Mr Miliband Cameron’s cringe-worthy “common touch” of “call me Dave”. He then said he had forgotten the question. The questioner rose again and said something about the “rift” in the party. “Aha” said DM “I though you said the ‘riff’ in the party”. I am still unsure whether this was a reach for a feeble pun, a genuine insensitivity to the questioner’s accent or just the noise of a mind misfiring.

I’ve been lucky enough in my time to have heard some great speakers. Better still, I have heard speakers who have inspired me. I didn’t feel any inspiration tonight. Perhaps I’m too old for that now. Perhaps others in the room felt their spirits rise and felt that tug of wanting to be engaged – to pour out of the marquee and effect change. If they did, I’d be delighted. Perhaps now all I am good for is writing a cheque to the campaign fund. Where’s my pen?