Bill Jamieson: New Labour’s Nearly Man bows out

IN HIS departure from UK politics this week, David Miliband has played out the latest act, not in one political drama, but two.

The first was the defeat at the hands of his younger brother for the leadership of the Labour Party in which he had entered as clear favourite. It was a political fratricide like no other.

The second was to endure entrapment in the Commons for three years, manifestly capable of a greater contribution, but fearful that elevation to the shadow cabinet would have catapulted him into an unending psycho-drama.

Every remark, each tilt of the head, every movement of the eyebrow would have been scrutinised for a sign of political difference with his brother. It would have been a constant, and frustrating, distraction. This was no future to galvanise or inspire. Indeed, it is hard to see which fate was more painful for him: the defeat or its aftermath.

So, his exit this week to New York to run the International Rescue Committee poses two key questions. What is the gap left by his departure from UK politics? And does it enhance the position of his brother, or weaken it?

Those not close to the Westminster political theatre will have found David Miliband a difficult phenomenon to define. His contribution to Labour politics is not to be found in books or speeches. He was neither a Big Idea thinker nor a rouser of rabbles. Rather, it is in his grounding of political reality and his aura of leadership where he made his mark and where his loss to Labour will be most keenly felt.

The measure of this loss could fairly be said to be the yawning distance now between Labour’s electoral prospects in the 2015 general election and the public standing currently of his brother Ed. Labour is ahead of the Conservatives in the polls, but the personal rating of Ed Miliband as a future prime minister lags well behind. Put another way, a Labour opposition led by David Miliband would now in all likelihood be regarded as something more than a credible and competent alternative. Against a disarming but floundering coalition Prime Minister the former foreign secretary would have cut an altogether more incisive, mature and authoritative figure, and very much a prime minister in waiting. That is the crucial difference between being leader of the opposition and the next prime minister.

And that difference can be measured in the coverage of his departure from politics when the passage of three years might have all but obliterated any trace. In fact, for Labour his exit brought back the stab of the sharpest and most uncomfortable needle of remembrance: David Miliband did not just “come close” to winning the leadership contest. He was favoured by a majority both of Labour MPs and of grass roots party members. It was the trade union bloc vote that gifted the prize to his younger brother. This is a killer fact of which voters will be reminded, loud and often, as the general election nears.

I cannot say that David Miliband as a member of the Labour government cabinet much moved the Earth for me. He came from within that small metropolitan coterie of party political gofers and advisers with no experience of the outside world, either in the private sector or the public. His exclusive concentration at an early stage in party thinking and philosophy bestowed on him an aloofness, a recoil from public engagement, which some saw as arrogance. Labour MP John Mann described him this week as “the man who would have been prime minister if he had ever asked ‘and what is your view?’”

For those who see politics as centrally a battle of ideas, of clear, competing visions between one course and another, one future and another, one world and another, the elder Miliband seems little more than a blur, a presence with no substance, someone who was in the room without opening a door. His entry, if noted at all, would be as definable as a passing rush of air.

He inherited the Tony Blair mantle, and shared with his mentor a reputation not of being not a game-changer but a moderniser, not a radical but a progressive, not a shaker but a mover. He clearly revelled, as Blair did, in jet-set international summitry, globe-trotting and meeting and mingling with those of influence and power.

What aided him in this was a shrewd intelligence, a mastery of brief, an ability to read and to convey nuance and a readiness to see the world as it really is, not as ideologues tended to see it. And by that set of connections and familiarity with power politics, he enjoyed an aura of charisma. His presence could be, and at times was, formidable. That much is evident from the coverage of his departure this week. Yet, he leaves as much a paradox as a presence.

Strangely, for all his exclusive focus on policy research and advisory work, there is no abiding body of beliefs or political philosophy that was singular or distinctively his. And it is hard to construct from the body of his work how a Labour government under his leadership would have addressed the post-financial crash and dramatically changed world we are now in.

It is one thing to be a policy wonk when public expenditure can be increased and borrowing expanded to meet the ambitions of a social democratic party. It is a different game now. The greatest challenge facing a UK government of whatever hue is how to address the crippling legacy of deficit and debt. And there is a widespread sense among voters that an incoming Labour administration would have to pursue a politics of retrenchment and deficit reduction not all that dissimilar to that of the coalition.

This is why the critique of Ed Balls, trenchant as it is in rhetoric and delivery, has not won wider endorsement across the electorate. The party has still to fess up, to address the profound problems of its financial legacy, admit to past errors and misjudgments, and to move on with fresh thinking and ideas.

To be fair, this problem of defining and breathing life into a new politics is by no means unique to Labour. It is a conundrum facing all western social democratic parties.

There is much a Labour government could offer: promoting and energising the third sector of social enterprise; spreading the John Lewis partnership model to public sector organisations; reforming the banking sector and boosting growth without relapsing into a Brownite retread. This is the task with which the party’s thinkers and policy wonks now have to grapple.

It would be tempting to think that, with his background, David Miliband would now be a powerful figure in Labour, capable of catalysing new ideas and driving them to the fore. But of this, there was all too little sign. He came close to power, but no more.

And that is what critically defines him as New Labour’s Nearly Man.