Big Brother Miliband returns to back benches

So, David Miliband has taken the long walk from the limelight to the back benches apparently in the hope that his little brother Ed can be left to lead the Labour Party in peace (or into pieces).

I can see that he's already spent three years as the smoking gun in one cabinet, with the tiniest suggestion of rebellion leading to the entire political press pack camping on his doorstep. More of the same on that front, especially given the family angle, would be pretty agonising. We saw what happened when he snapped at Harriet Harman for clapping Ed yesterday. He knows every raised eye row or wry smile would have Nick Robinson in a tizz.

Good luck to him. David's retreat from frontline politics will take some of the heat but I suspect that every time Ed falters, or gets up the nose of one of Labour's factions, there will be speculation about his leadership and whether his big brother could take over if he were forced out.

I suspect David has back benched himself for the duration of this Parliament because any attempt to re-join would be seen as a challenge.

I wonder if things would be the same, and Ed would have quit the Shadow Cabinet, if David had won. I suspect not. He was only the front runner after the ballot closed and he wasn't that well known. I reckon he could have stayed in relative anonymity in David's Shadow Cabinet.

David is now going to spend time with his family, saying that these last few years have been tough for him & his sons. Of course if he'd won, it would have been just as tough for them. I really don't like it when politicians use their kids in that way.

David will now have time to reflect on his actions over the past few years. I suspect he will regret not challenging Gordon Brown, but I doubt he could have snatched victory in May as people were sick of Labour, whoever led them.

He did mention in his statement that he wants to develop the community action programme that had been a major part of his leadership campaign. I just hope he gets rid of the control freaky house party instruction manual.

David's decision, of course, highlights the fairly massive divisions in the Labour Party and emphasises how hard a job Ed will have to keep everybody in the same library, let alone the same page.

His time as leader is not going to be easy. No wonder he looked so miserable when he won.

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David Miliband just doesn't get gender equality

Labour leadership candidate David Miliband has been boasting on Twitter about his five point plan for gender equality. Well three of the five points are internal Labour Party stuff, and the other two involve Parliament's working hours and nicking our policy on flexible working and sharing parental leave. He even qualifies that with an "over time".

Nothing about equal pay, tackling employment discrimination, body image issues, portrayal of women in the media, violence against women, all the things tackled in the Real Women policy document debated at last year's Liberal Democrat conference.

In contrast, Miliband's approach seems tokenistic and irrelevant. He really doesn't get it.

This is as good an opportunity as any to tell you of the amusing moment last night when the Elephant shamefacedly announced to Twitter that he'd had an invitation from David Miliband to join his campaign for leader. It must have been that rave review he wrote of Miliband's mentor's memoirs that did it!

My imagination is running wild with images of our fluffy friend holding a house meeting for Miliband. Would he break the control freaky rules and show a Doctor Who dvd? We'll never know.

David Miliband and the curious loss of persepctive

 It's definitely not like me to write two posts about David Miliband in one day, but he's provided me with the material. I was shocked by the lack of judgement in his tweet above during PMQs yesterday.

Equating the Claudy conspiracy with the allegations against Andy Coulson case, covering up complicity in murder as regards unproven allegations on phone tapping which the Police are continuing to investigate is surely unbecoming to a man who thinks he's got what it takes to be Prime Minister.

This is a prime example of failing to engage your brain before you tweet, but I am very wary of the sort of instinct that can be behind such a thought.

Labour Leadership - who would you vote for?

Well, of course I don't have a vote, but if I did it would be emphatically cast for Diane Abbott. Not because I agree with everything she says. Far from it. But because she has earned my respect over many years for not conforming in a party that demands conformity and sheep like behaviour when in vicinity of voting lobbies.

Let's look at what she had to say on the issue of 42 days' detention - a speech that tugs at the heart strings of any Liberal Democrat, a speech so good that Liberty put it on their website.

This stuff is, well, wow!

I am a Londoner and I heard the last major IRA bomb, at Canary Wharf, from my kitchen in east London. Like thousands of Londoners, I waited for the early-morning call that assured me that friends and family on their way to work and school had not been caught up in those bombings. I will not take lectures from ministers about not taking terrorism seriously.

I do not believe, as ministers continue to insist, that there is some trade-off between our liberties and the safety of the realm. What makes us free is what makes us safe, and what makes us safe is what will make us free.

and then this:

I came into politics because of my concern about the relationship of the state to communities that are marginalised and suspected. It is easy to stand up for the civil liberties of our friends or of people in our trade union, but it is not easy to stand up for the civil liberties of people who are unpopular, suspected and look suspicious—people the tabloids print a horror story about every day.

However, it is a test of parliament that we are willing to stand up for the civil liberties of the marginalised, the suspect and the unpopular.

I came into politics about those issues, and I believe that if there is any content at all in ministers' constant speeches about community cohesion we must offer every part of our community not just the appearance but the reality of justice and equality before the law.

Seriously, read the whole thing.

And on top of all that, she even voted against the Digital Economy Act.
. She is good and if she won, she'd have some serious tanks to park on our lawn.

The chivalrous rush of rival candidates to get Diane Abbott on to the ballot would never have happened if any, of them thought she could win. And to be honest, from their point of view it's such tokenism that it's actually worse than our presenting our members with a choice of 2 middle class white males.

She's the only candidate, though, who represents a break with the past and who wasn't a part of the Government which has wreaked such havoc in the last 13 years. She's the only candidate who actually voted against the Iraq war. While the others have been swift to distance themselves from the worst of new Labour's excesses, and some have even sought out new depths to stoop to, Diane is the only one who can say on most of the issues that "it wisnae me".

There's a bit of me who wants to see her win, partly to puncture the smugness of the others, and partly because you'd hope that it would lead to a more mature politics, where genuine debate and discussion was the norm rather than the exception.

Among the rest we have Ed Balls, who Cameron completely skewered today, calling him the Alf Garnett of British politics. I mean, it's got to be bad if that comes from a Tory. David Miliband - the man who chickened out of challenging Brown in Summer 2008 and from then on had journalists camping on his doorstep every time there was a hint of rebellion in the air. He bottled it just like Brown did when it came down to it. I also just don't warm to him at all. His brother Ed - what's that all about - seems to be the more genuine and sympathetic a personality of the two brothers but tell me, what exactly did he achieve at Energy and Climate Change? As for Andy Burnham, well, ditto? If those four were a meal, they'd be polenta added with a side order of cous cous without any flavouring and no side salad.

I'm really disappointed that two people from the previous Cabinet have not bothered to enter the contest - Harriet Harman and Alan Johnson. I always used to look forward to PMQs when it was Harman, Hague and The Almighty Vince, it was always much more intelligent and lighter, I think. As for Johnson, well, Brown did well to put him in the graveyeard job of Home Secretary, but he could have injected some much needed personality and humour into the contest.

There's a long way to go, but I have yet to see anything that sounds like an original idea from any of the candidates. This is a party that thinks it can put its feet up for five years and point, laugh and be as destructive as possible. They think bucketloads of bile will win them the next election. We'll see, though, whether they can bring themselves back from the party that trashed the place and left everyone else to mop up the mess. How do they make themselves credible again?

It's a long time until the ballots are counted on 25th September. Let's see whether the campaign inspires or drags on. I'm not holding my breath.

Loyalty, Miliband style as Blairites Plot and Blears Blubs

It can't really be much fun being in the Labour party at the moment - it's almost as bad as Formula 1 for high political drama!

I really don't know how David "the Ditherer" Miliband does it. He's let a few more drops of poison drop from his tongue in an interview with the Guardian today.

He may well have had to wrestle with his conscience about whether to stay in Gordon Brown's government, but did he really need to share his inner turmoil with us, a week after the event? It's a sign of Gordon Brown's weakness that he can't sack him for continuing to undermine his leadership and effectively saying that he's only in the Government because of Peter Mandelson.

His insights into current ministerial thinking do little to allay assertions that the Government is finished.

"Labour first needs a period of competent, effective, stable government; secondly, we need to reset our political compass so ministers are no longer locked in their departments, but link their policies to their values; and thirdly, the government has to be at the cutting edge of policy."

So, what he's effectively saying is that the Government in which he occupies one of the main offices of state has been ineffective, incompetent and unstable - and that Government policy has no basis in their values. That's pretty damning! I suppose it was so obvious, but even still, for a minister to actually admit that the Government has lost the plot is quite something.

At the same time, we have Peter Mandelson warning of further leadership challenges. I guess this is a message to plotting Blairites, that, like Sting in the song, he's watching every breath they take."

I was amused by one point in his interview where he outlined his 3 pieces of advice to Gordon Brown:

"I believe in leadership and in being decisive.

"Secondly, in listening to people and respecting official advice you receive.

"And thirdly, introducing a bit of humour and jollity to your work."

The mental image that that has conjured up, of Brown leading Downing Street staff in a conga on Friday afternoons, is not entirely pleasing.

And finally, in a move that's I'm sure is completely unrelated to a planned motion of no confidence in her as MP by her local constituency party, Hazel Blears has said sorry cos she didn't realise that resigning as local government secretary on the day before local government elections might be harmful to the Government, that she'd somehow get lost in the crowd of departing ministers. I suspect the real reason for her tears is that she's not being hailed as the woman who brought down Gordon Brown. His survival was clearly as unexpected to her as Glenn Close jumping out of the bath at the end of Fatal Attraction.

No doubt we will continue to be served up such delights in the press. How nice would it be if they all stopped bitching and got on with governing? Way too much to hope for!






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