Is Ed Miliband the new Clement Attlee? Rubbish, I hear you cry. Attlee was Labour’s best and most successful leader ever, while Ed Miliband is – well,
Ed Miliband. But if, at any time between his election as Labour leader in 1935 and 1940, you’d asked around about Attlee, you would have been told he was unelectable. “And a little mouse shall lead them”, confided a bitterly disappointed Hugh Dalton to his diary on the night of the election.
Attlee was elected leader partly because the front runner, Herbert Morrison, was thought to be too close to Ramsay Macdonald, the good-looking, charismatic Labour leader with a beautiful voice, beloved of duchesses, who was widely perceived to have dumped all Labour’s principles even before he dumped the Labour Party itself – just as David Miliband lost out to his brother because he was perceived as being too close to Tony Blair. Attlee was the opposite of Macdonald, as Ed Miliband is the opposite of Blair.
Morrison always believed Attlee had to be dumped because he did not look or sound prime ministerial. But Attlee’s great strength was his certainty, his ruthless self-belief. He had a mind like a steel trap. When Britain had a war-ravaged economy and needed a vast loan from the United States just to stay afloat, Attlee introduced a full-blooded welfare state while Morrison was urging caution. His Cabinet meetings were short and to the point, and they reached decisions. He was ruthless with ministers. One minister asked why he was being fired. “Not up to it”, said the Prime Minister.
In the short time he has had, Ed Miliband has shown that quality twice. First, he decided to run against his older brother, who was the front runner, knowing that if he succeeded, he would destroy, almost certainly for good, the lifetime ambition of a brother he loved – and would probably destroy their relationship (as he has, according to the excellent biography by Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre).
Second, his attack on Rupert Murdoch’s empire and his call for its breakup, to the horror of many of his front bench and while David Cameron and Nick Clegg were still saying the minimum they could get away with, was clear, brave and decisive. Ever since Tony Blair went to pay homage at the court of King Rupert, it has been accepted wisdom that no one can become Prime Minister if Murdoch is determined that they shouldn’t. Look what happened to Neil Kinnock, they say. I’m told that Murdoch sent the boys round to tell young Ed to watch his step.
Miliband gambled that the Murdoch empire will never be able to do that again. By gambling on that, Miliband has made it more likely that it will be true.
But – I hear you cry – this is not 1945. You need an image and you need to be good on telly. You think Attlee didn’t have an image? A wise man, he made his image fairly close to the real man – terse, calm, phlegmatic, pipe-smoking and reassuring. As for broadcasting – well, television didn’t matter then, but radio did, and Attlee in 1945 was up against Winston Churchill, the greatest broadcaster of his age.
The Labour Party should hold its nerve. Its leader is clearly holding his, and my advice to him is: go on being yourself, Ed. You’re not a Tony Blair or a Ramsay Macdonald, you don’t have the easy charm, the good looks, the superficiality. Ignore the siren voices that tell you that you have to turn yourself into something different. Labour’s spin doctors have a bad record in this respect – they told Neil Kinnock he had to start sounding “prime ministerial” and if only he hadn’t listened, he might have been Prime Minister. If you go on being who you are, the country will learn to trust you.
Francis Beckett is the author of Clem Attlee, published by Politicos
