I shouldn’t do this, I know, but the urge is overwhelming, and as we also know, few emotions are sweeter than schadenfreude. Anyway, during one of David Miliband’s several previous failures to become leader of the Labour Party, I asked the then MP for Medway, Bob Marshall-Andrews, for his judgement on the little chap. Bob fixed me with a beady eye, paused for dramatic effect, and then drawled “Gap year”.
I can’t exactly explain why Bob’s summation was simultaneously so accurate and so funny, but that’s how the best jokes work: you can’t see the works.
Nonetheless, ever since I’ve never been able to look at David Miliband in quite the same way. Indeed, irrespective of my plea in my last column for Labour Party members to vote for anyone except the “Destiny” candidate, I’ve been quite unable to see what it was that people saw in David Miliband that made them think he was both leadership material and a potential Prime Minister.
Maybe it’s just me. I recognise that I’m curiously immune to political charisma, or attempts to peddle it. I met Tony Blair several times, early on, when serious, grown-up journalists were getting hot flushes just at the thought of him, and I thought he was a strangely inarticulate and rather nervous gimpy wimp.
Once, having been mysteriously invited to the launch party for Bill Clinton’s memoirs, I thought I’d better join the scrum of people – mostly women – waiting to be glad handed by him as he made way – for over an hour – to the exit. Eventually my turn came and, being a true pro, Bill gave me the full works: held onto my hand for much longer than necessary, looked me straight in the eye with an industrial strength twinkle, clutched my elbow in his other hand, told me how much he admired cartoons and cartoonists, and I felt… nothing.
Nothing, that is, beyond a grudging appreciation of the effort he’d made, and also how his methods were rather basic and cheesy. All around me, however, people of both sexes were almost in ecstasy following their brief encounters with Clinton.
I’m not sure whether this immunity is healthy or unhealthy, and it seems only to apply to politicians. I once made a complete idiot of myself telling the actor Bill Nighy how great I thought he was, while at the same time apologising for saying so; to his credit, he responded by saying he once shared a lift with Charlie Watts from the Rolling Stones for 15 floors, but was too awe-struck to say a word.
Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying it’s unlikely that I would be charmed by David Miliband in any circumstances. The point, however, is that although I’m not susceptible, I recognise it when it’s happening, and in David’s case I never detected any evidence of that weird, indefinable magnetism that’s meant to accompany and thereafter help define this thing called leadership.
To be honest, I don’t detect it in David Cameron either and I’ve no idea whether or not Ed Miliband has it in spades or not at all. But David’s apparent lack of it helps explain why I cheered when he lost and why I remain mystified as to why anyone wanted him to win.
Because the overwhelming impression I got from him, and from his almost robotically New Labour timidity and caution, not least in his serial inability to deliver the coup de grace to Gordon Brown and save the Labour Government, was less that he was “gap year” and more that he’d very recently been a school prefect.
Probably quite unfairly, the thing I hated most about Blair was that ghastly, bouncy Christian school prefect side to him, marching into the junior common room and telling us all to, y’know, show a bit of enthusiasm. David Miliband isn’t quite that bad, but in common with all school prefects, I sense very strongly that he’s representing the interests of the teachers and not those of the pupils. In other words, his role as leader of the Labour Party would have echoed Blair’s: constantly to abuse and browbeat Labour out of its best intentions, for fear of upsetting the grown-ups.
Which gets us to the heart of the matter. That the fundamental difference between Labour and the Tories is that Labour still hasn’t managed to acquire the Tories’ inbuilt sense of entitlement to power.
And while it’s one of their more odious qualities, it does, in the short term, enable them to act in government with a daring and ruthlessness mostly absent from the New Labour governments of the past 13 years where and when it really mattered.
I’ve no idea how apologetic Ed Miliband might turn out to be, or how much he intends to appease those forces in our country totally inimical to the aspirations of the Labour Party and its supporters.
But just for now, it’s comforting to know that the Destiny candidate – the nice, safe, sensible, responsible, grown-up one – has ended up in the dustbin of history.
