Suicide Note

Image result for david and ed miliband + images

David Miliband has maintained a dignified silence since losing the Labour leadership to his younger brother Ed, but chose to speak out recently as the scale of the party's defeat begins to sink home.

In this piece for The Times Rachel Sylvester and Michael Savage lay out what is now being described as Labour's five-year suicide note under Ed Miliband's leadership that was won only through trade union votes which overturned the clear will of individual Labour Party members.  

So while trade union bosses were very pleased with their results of their intervention at the time (back in 2010), the end result has been a majority Conservative Government at Westminster and a virtual wipeout of Labour in Scotland.  

Ed’s five-year suicide note left Labour doomed from the start


Ed Miliband resigned as Labour leader after losing the election i-Images Picture Agency

By Rachel Sylvester and Michael Savage - The Times

Philip Gould was close to death and painfully weak with cancer but his political instincts were as strong as ever. Labour’s legendary strategist could not understand why Ed Miliband was turning his back on his party’s most popular achievements in power while failing to admit to what voters saw as mistakes. “I agree we concede and move on,” he told the leader’s pollster, James Morris, when he visited him at his home overlooking Regent’s Park in early 2011, “but this seems to be conceding on everything except the economy and I would do the opposite.”

Now, as Labour struggles to come to terms with its devastating election defeat and nominations for the leadership open, the party is still grappling with how to reconcile its past with its future, regain economic credibility and reflect the cultural anxieties of modern Britain.

When Mr Miliband became leader in September 2010, Pat McFadden, now Europe spokesman, said the party was embarking on a “huge experiment in whether you can win from a position to the left of New Labour”. That theory has been “tested to destruction”, he says. Lord Mandelson believes “Labour handed the election to the Conservatives on a plate”. As he watched the results pouring in, with a growing sense of foreboding, “it was almost as if New Labour hadn’t existed and we had never won three elections in a row”, says the man who had replaced the red flag with the red rose. “I felt as if the clock had been turned back and all the years of change and broadening our appeal were being flushed away.”

Brothers and fathers

In a sense this was the point. Ed had stood against his brother, David, because he wanted to take the party — and the country — in a different direction. “It was the idea that there was something fundamentally wrong with New Labour” that motivated him, according to one close ally. David Blunkett, the former home secretary, says: “This is why he ran, this is why he did what he did to his brother because he believed he was right and David was wrong. So he couldn’t get into his head that he needed to reach out.” Whether it was foreign policy, his attitude to business or public service reforms, the younger Miliband was determined to define himself in contrast to Tony Blair. Even in the final days of the election campaign, he had to be talked out of making a speech denouncing the war in Iraq — hardly an issue of concern to swing voters in marginal seats.

As time went on, and the fractured relationships in his own family failed to heal, the determination to renounce the past developed an increasingly psychological tint. “Quite a lot of conversations, throughout the five years, would begin with ‘Why I stood for the Labour leadership’,” recalls one member of his team. “Ed was constantly seeking to justify to himself and those around him why he’d stood against his brother.”

He was also trying to escape the ghost of his political father. Gordon Brown had once asked a group of aides why they had joined the Labour party. “To help the bottom 25 per cent,” replied Stewart Wood, who became one of Mr Miliband’s closest advisers. “Yes,” said Mr Brown, “but we mustn’t say that or we will never win.”

Convinced that the centre of gravity had shifted to the left after the economic crash, Mr Miliband was desperate to prove him wrong with a programme committed explicitly to tackling inequality. But he was haunted by his mentor’s warning. According to one ally: “Ed’s theory was that there was something wrong with the system, that it was nasty and exploitative and had to be changed, but I don’t think he felt that the British people were quite there, so there was this very radical project wrapped up in a cautious, incremental approach.”

Seeds of defeat

It may be this internal tension that explains why Mr Miliband never dealt with Labour’s deepest flaw: a perceived lack of economic competence. Many members of his team are now convinced that the seeds of the defeat were sown at the very start of his leadership when he refused to admit that the party had spent too much in power.

Had David Miliband won the contest he would have dealt with this issue straight away. Alan Johnson, who was appointed shadow chancellor in 2010, had helped the older brother to include a form of apology in his acceptance speech and thought that Ed should take a similar approach. “I was arguing, ‘Get it out of the way quickly and move on but don’t go on and on about it’,” he says.

Mr Johnson resigned after four months and Ed Balls took over the Treasury job. In his first appearance on The Andrew Marr Show he gave a firm “no” to the spending question. One strategist says: “None of us had spoken to him beforehand, I don’t think he’d massively thought about it, but it was then hard to get out of it.” Labour’s pollsters, Mr Morris and Stan Greenberg, submitted numerous memos urging a change of tack. A 2010 note insisted the party should be arguing that “the deficit is the No 1 challenge facing the country”. Another the following year warned that lack of trust over the economy was putting a “ceiling” on Labour’s ability to win votes.

By contrast, Alastair Campbell, Mr Blair’s former press secretary, tried repeatedly to persuade Mr Miliband to fight the idea that Labour had wrecked the economy. He advised him to commission an independent report into Labour’s past spending plans, overseen by a credible figure such as Jim O’Neill or Lord Browne of Madingley. It would almost certainly have cleared Labour of blame, with a minor dispute around whether the party could have spent less in 2007. The idea was not taken up. According to one insider: “Ed neither confronted nor conceded.” Mr Morris believes this was afatal mistake. “There wasn’t a clean break with the past. As a result, every time David Cameron wheeled out a five-year-old letter from Liam Byrne, it damaged us.”

Two Eds are better than one

The relationship between the two Eds became a source of constant tension. Mr Miliband had initially refused to give Mr Balls the shadow chancellor’s job, offering it first to his brother, who turned it down, then to Mr Johnson. When “AJ” left, there was a meeting at the leader’s house in Dartmouth Park to discuss who should replace him.

Mr Miliband’s wife, Justine, thought it would be “crazy” to give such a strong-minded rival the job and an aide told the leader that if he appointed Mr Balls it would be “the last decision” he ever took. Having tried — and failed again — to give it to David, Mr Miliband decided he had no alternative.

The leader and shadow chancellor had fundamentally different ideas about economic policy. Mr Balls was sceptical about Mr Miliband’s determination to “reshape capitalism”; Mr Miliband was irritated by his appointment’s mechanistic approach. He was furious when, shortly after arriving, the shadow chancellor produced a “five-point plan” for stimulating growth without consulting him. “It was all printed by the party without the leader’s office seeing it. It was outrageous,” says one ally.

Although both men worked hard to avoid the warring of the Blair/Brown years, there was mutual frustration. Mr Balls had grave reservations about both the energy price freeze and the tuition fees pledge. His team blocked a corporation tax increase. One Blairite says he became “a bulwark” against stupid ideas.

Predators and producers

Despite warnings from his shadow chancellor about anti-business rhetoric, Mr Miliband used his 2011 conference speech to mount a crusade against “predatory” capitalism. This was to have been bolstered by a promise to force top universities to take five pupils from each state school, but the pledge was dropped by the leader at the last minute, ensuring that the “predators and producers” line became the story. “We were all over the place because we had prepared for something else,” admits one aide, “but I think Ed wanted that to be the row.”

Mr Balls and Chuka Umunna, the shadow business secretary, tried desperately to build bridges with the private sector, holding dozens of meetings in the run-up to the election. But dinners organised for the leader by Labour-supporting business people were “an absolute disaster”, according to one attendee. “They felt Ed Miliband was suffering them.”

Opportunities to counter the idea that he was against wealth creation were missed. One policy drawn up by his team but never pursued was to allow young people to use the student finance system to start a business. Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP, introduced one of Mr Miliband’s advisers to a senior retail expert but the aide was only interested in discussing the creation of “no brand” zones. “We went from no brand to Russell Brand in six months. It encapsulated the problem,” he says.

Margaret Hodge, who as chairwoman of the public accounts committee led a campaign against corporate tax evasion, met many small businessmen during the campaign who had switched to the Tories. “Our agenda seemed to be all about punishing wealth creators,” she says. Lord Noon, a Labour donor, told the leader his mansion tax proposal was “insane”. As part of a close Indian family he also found Mr Miliband’s decision to stand against his brother abhorrent. “To me, this is something that’s not correct. Ed could have waited his chance.”

The lack of professionalism shocked others. Last January Bill Grimsey, the former Iceland chief executive, was asked to do a study of the high street. “I said I needed to meet Ed, look him in the eye and understand his vision for town centres. It never happened. That’s a simple example of their lack of organisational structure. All they really wanted me to do was travel round the country for a PR exercise.”

One nation, Two strategies

In 2012 Mr Miliband tried a softer message, promising to be a “One Nation” leader. Slowly, however, the inclusive approach was drowned out by a harder edged “cost of living” campaign, pitting rich against poor. A series of “retail” policies — such as rent controls and a minimum wage rise — were announced, but some in the leader’s office worried the party lacked broader appeal. It was “vote Labour, get a microwave”, warned David Axelrod, the former Obama strategist hired in April 2014.

To help his poor leadership ratings, Mr Campbell pushed hard for Mr Miliband to go to Germany on his first big foreign trip. The idea was canned because Mr Miliband worried that a press conference with Angela Merkel could not be guaranteed.

Marc Stears, a friend from university who became Mr Miliband’s speech writer, recalls helping to draft a tribute to Baroness Thatcher after her death. “Ed kept saying, ‘I want to speak directly to people who voted for her and loved her’. He was a natural unifier but that side of him was never brought out. We ended up with a harsher, more divisive message.”

Losing Middle England

Labour seemed to give up on trying to win over former Conservative voters, focusing instead on wooing Lib Dems and shoring up its traditional base. David Lammy, the Tottenham MP and London mayoral candidate, says it was a disaster. “Ed’s instincts were those of a Hampstead liberal, and there aren’t that many of those.”

Mr Johnson believes the problem was the message, not the man. “He talked about the squeezed middle but the middle got squeezed out. There was a lot for the very poor and a lot about the very rich not paying their whack, but what about all those people in between?”

Alistair Darling, the former chancellor, found the campaign uninspiring. “We didn’t offer a compelling vision of the future. You can’t win on a series of ‘retail offers’ like ten bob off your next electricity bill.” Now, he warns, Labour “cannot assume we are at the bottom of the sea”. Jacqui Smith, the former home secretary, says the party “lost middle England” — both geographically and politically — but also failed to recognise the risk of Ukip in the northern heartlands. “I warned a year ago that Ukip would be a greater threat to Labour than the Tories. I asked to speak to Ed, I offered to help but the message came back that I wasn’t needed.” On immigration, tougher policies were announced but Miliband was more comfortable talking about his own parents’ experiences as refugees than emphasising controls.

There was an at times almost comical neurosis about the issue: in a moment straight out of The Thick of It, a planned photo call with the leader in front of the Brighton Pavilion was dropped because an aide feared voters might think it was a mosque. The word “fair” was removed from a pledge promising controls on immigration after focus groups said they thought it meant Labour would “give immigrants more stuff”.

Yet on immigration — as on the deficit — the attempt at reassurance failed because it was not consistent or sustained. Mr Miliband only made matters worse when he omitted to mention these two most toxic issues in his final conference speech, delivered without notes. Forced to concentrate on a new opening section added at the last minute after David Cameron promised to join the US bombing of Isis in Iraq, he simply forgot — but he knew it was a disaster. Afterwards he was so mortified that he shut himself in his hotel room and refused to come out.

Measuring the curtains

Although Labour’s internal polling had consistently put the party six or seven points lower than it was in the public polls, as the election neared it showed the positions between the two main parties narrowing. Mr Miliband had a good campaign, with confident appearances in the television leaders’ debate.

On polling day, Labour was actively preparing for power, briefing political editors about the definition of legitimacy in the cabinet manual. According to Tory sources, the Miliband team told the civil service that they would expect the Cameron family to be out of No 10 by the weekend if the Conservatives lost. Labour had already been consulted about the interior decor of the private office for a refurbishment during the campaign.

But the economic competence problem remained unresolved. Just a week before the election, there were gasps from the Question Time studio audience when Mr Miliband answered “no” to a question about whether Labour had spent too much.

As she toured the country in her pink bus, Harriet Harman heard the same message over and over again. “It was a worry about whether we could be trusted on the economy and trusted to look after people who were working hard but not on the breadline,” she says.

The Conservative attack on a Labour government propped up by the SNP was, in her view, so devastating only because it was “pushing at an existing weakness. At the end the undecided voters decided to stick with the devil they knew.”

The election result was, the former cabinet minister Alan Milburn believes, entirely predictable. “The last five years have been a ghastly experiment in kidding ourselves that something fundamentally had changed in the laws of politics, and it hadn’t.” Certainly what happened on May 7 was determined long before. “The strategic decisions that were taken right at the outset set the tramlines for the parliament,” says a Miliband adviser, “and that strategy was inevitably leading towards defeat.”

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