With inferior white wine at £4.10 for half a glass in the Civic Centre, Leeds, it was surprising that there was such a queue at the bar for Labour’s local election fundraising dinner. A resuscitation room would have been more useful than the heart-starters on offer, but a “Tyke Spring” is in the air. Yorkshire’s most successful city is about to fall properly into Labour hands, along with Liberal Democrat-controlled Sheffield and Hull. Municipal revenge is sweet.
I say “properly”, because Leeds City Council has been run by a minority Labour administration since last May, when voters punished the Tory-led rainbow coalition for its rubbish handling of an 11-week binmen’s strike. Stage two of that punishment ritual is due on May 5, and Ed Miliband was present at the dinner to cheer on the faithful.
I can’t say it was a bravura performance. Ed doesn’t really do bravura. I struggle to think of who he reminds me of – and fail. He isn’t Neil Kinnock and (thank heaven) he isn’t Tony Blair. He isn’t Gordon Brown and if he was ever a Brownite, he’s sloughed off that particular skin.
There is something of the John Smith about him: low-key, purposeful and without side. Even I’m too young to remember Clement Attlee, but comparisons with Labour’s greatest Prime Minister have been drawn by those who do.
In truth, he’s his own man, which is why the innate common sense of party members and trade unionists put him where he is today. Quite who that man is, we are only just beginning to learn. Certainly, we now know that he proposed to partner Justine Thornton in March last year and simply ignored media pressure to go public on his marriage plans until he and she were ready to tell the world what they’d already agreed themselves. The Daily Mail could go to hell (if only), but they would proceed at their own pace.
I like that. It isn’t a big thing, but it’s a good thing. It shows he can take the pressure – and he will have to take it on the big things as well as the small things.
At present, he’s got to take it on the chin at Prime Minister’s Questions from David Cameron who thinks he’s at the top of his game. Ed keeps his cool, knowing that the television cameras will zoom on him after every Cameron insult. If he calculates that public opprobrium will settle on the Prime Minister for his sneering style, he may well be right.
Meanwhile, he was completely relaxed amid the municipal splendour of the Civic Suite. No gun-toting guards, as far as I could see, and only one local press officer. Miliband worked the tables – there must have been a couple of hundred people there – and spoke for about 10 minutes.
It was his third engagement of the evening, after a meeting in Sheffield and a dinner of Asian businessmen at the Leeds Armoury. He has the stamina alright.
Interestingly, he didn’t even mention the alternative vote or the referendum. This wasn’t perhaps the most fertile ground on which to scatter the seeds of electoral reform. No, he began by praising the TUC rally, the “extraordinary demonstration of hundreds of thousands of people up and down this country who are saying there is an alternative to what the Government is doing. We should be proud of that rally and proud of that march on that show of solidarity.”
Whoa! Solidarity! The “s” word! I don’t think we would have got that from his big brother. He went on to ask: “Are we ready to win a majority on the council?” to roars of “Yes”. There is a natural politician here, y’know. “We have to fight this election as if it were a general election, because it’s the best way of sending a clear message to this Government. I know you will work your hearts out to do that.”
He moved on to the economy, “the deficit, how we cut it and all that.” Well, that’s one way of putting it. “The cuts are not the actual issue”, he insisted. “The actual issue is about our values and the kind of society we believe in.”
Lib Dem £9,000 tuition fees are a battle for the next generation. To Tory barbs about calling people on the march “heroes”, he was unapologetic. Was he saying that? “Yes I am.” That was well received. This city, this county, sent thousands to London to join the protest.
“We have to make the argument about cuts into something bigger. It’s about the country you want to live in”, he argued. “There is an alternative. Say that to friends and others on the doorstep. Don’t let anyone tell you that if Labour had been in power, nothing would have been done.”
Ed then returned to the subject of the demo. It seems that some of the Tory jibes could have hit their mark. “Why is it that people are so unfavourable about the TUC march?” he asked. “Why? Of course, we all condemn violence. There is a reason for it [the unfavourable comments, not the violence]. People find it threatening, and I’m not talking about anarchists in Oxford Street. I’m talking about the fact that people find the idea of hundreds of thousands of people saying this is what we believe in, what we stand for, is very, very threatening. That’s why they want to make it a debate about anything other than the cause for which they were marching.”
He might have articulated it better, but the message is there. The Tories and their allies do feel rattled by any mass exhibition of strong feeling against their policies. As well they should. So, with the help of a compliant media, they make violence the story, not the protest. Half a million say “No”, but a couple of hundred break windows and they get the headlines. Keep telling the real story, Ed.
