IN January, 2015 Ed Miliband announced that he would win the UK election by having “four million conversations in just four months about how we change our country.” In fact, Miliband’s campaigners eventually had five million conversations. Unfortunately for Labour they weren’t really conversations and, anyway, they were getting the rubber ear. The mystery of these wasted conversations is at the heart of BBC Political Correspondent Iain Watson’s take on the Labour campaign, which he was assigned to follow.
The problem began with the man at the top, who for all his “talking directly to the British people” was not trusted by his own advisers to do so. The first picture in Watson’s book shows Miliband in a Huddersfield factory. Ten bewildered representatives of the British people are gathered around some machinery behind him while he speaks from a podium that his aides insisted he use.
Sadly, Ed wasn’t much better at eating in front of the British people, as his infamous struggle with a bacon sandwich had demonstrated before the previous year’s European elections. The bacon lingered long in the digestive system and played a part in self-defeating decisions like banning the press from the UK launch of the party’s black and ethnic minority manifesto in Leicester. According to Watson, Miliband’s advisers were worried that he would have to try “weird” food in front of the cameras.
In retrospect, Miliband’s campaign was star-crossed from the beginning. Trapped between New Labour and Corbyn, he drowned in a sea of slogans only to resurface spraying around terms like “triple-lock” and “predistribution”. Watson questioned Miliband on immigration and got a “long and complex” answer which, according to an aide, made him seem “too soft on f***ing immigration”. Not for the first time, one feels a pang of sympathy for Miliband. As the son of immigrant parents, and with his own advisors telling him to echo the Tories' number-driven, anti-immigrant rhetoric, long and complex answers may have been his only resort.
Watson briefly compares Labour’s campaign to those of its rivals. It was worse than that of the Conservatives, who in times of need would simply throw a dead cat on the table (i.e. change the subject). Tommy Sheppard’s Edinburgh East campaign is used as a case study to demonstrate the SNP’s sophisticated planning and astute use of social media. But the real, if somewhat guilty, pleasure of Watson’s book is his bird’s-eye view of an endless series of gaffes by the Miliband camp that combined bad optics with terrible symbolism.
Old favourites like the Edstone and Russell Brand get a repeat airing, but from a Scottish perspective there were other strange goings-on. The SNP “problem” was costing Miliband in both Scotland and England, albeit for different reasons. Watson reveals that, in preparation for the leaders' debate, Miliband had Kezia Dugdale travel 200 miles to a hotel in Manchester and pretend to be Nicola Sturgeon. Miliband – a student of American politics – presumably resisted the temptation to channel his inner Dukakis and declare that the new leader of Scottish Labour was no Nicola Sturgeon.
The best conflation of bootlessness and absurdity, however, may have been April 10, when Miliband arrived in Edinburgh with Ed Balls and Jim Murphy. Their purpose was to lecture Scotland on the dangers of Full Fiscal Autonomy. The warning was to be delivered at the conference centre with Edinburgh Castle visible behind the lecterns. However, an unusually sunny day meant that the background had to be “burned out” so that the speakers would be clearly seen. Miliband and friends could have been speaking from “an anonymous office block just about anywhere in the Western world.”
The mystery of where they were coming from is, of course, now matched by the question of where they have gone. If the fall of Ed Miliband is the primary theme of Watson’s book, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn is a strong secondary one. BBC objectivity notwithstanding, Watson seems to be a fan. Several chapters are headlined by a piece of advice to the new leader – restore credibility on the economy, apologise for Iraq and so on. Curiously, “take an informed and nuanced view of Scotland” is not among them. Watson identifies “Scottish Labour’s existential threat” but has only the bleedin’ obvious to recommend: “The new UK and Scottish leaders will need to ‘build a movement’ from a much reduced base”. Either that or carp from the sidelines.
Five Million Conversations: How Labour lost an election and rediscovered its roots by Iain Watson; Luath, £12.99
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