A few savage sentences from the editor of the New Statesman spills blood all over Labour’s carpet. “Ed Miliband is very much an old-style Hampstead socialist”, Jason Cowley famously concludes. “He doesn’t really understand the lower middle class or material ambition. He doesn’t understand Essex Man or Woman. Politics for him must seem at times like an extended PPE seminar: elevated talk about political economy and the good society.” Ouch! Yaroo!
The essential perception here is that junior Miliband is the wrong man at the wrong time, that what he believes and how he conveys it can’t resonate with the Britain he aspires to lead. New Dagenham wants something different. Ed and old Hampstead – stuck with “a deterministic, quasi-Marxist analysis of our present ills’ – will never “get it”.
OK. We’ve got it. But there’s a difficulty lurking here for the Staggers, for Cowley, and for any non-Tory newspaper or magazine tempted to strike up the same band. The New Statesman piece teeters on the brink of pronouncing Miliband incapable of change and hopelessly unelectable. So what do they say in six months’ time when a party, a manifesto and a would-be prime minister (the once and continuing Ed) have to be backed or deserted?
Leaders, bulwarked by the length and complexity of electoral college replacement, are notoriously hard to get rid of. Could the New Statesman, with its loyal readership and longstanding socialist traditions, advocate voting anything but Labour in 2015? And if it did, would Hampstead Man and Woman renew their subs? No wonder that the Indy, FT and Guardian were notably muted – nay, statesmanlike – in Cowley’s aftermath. Amid so much milling chaos, there’s nil point in tying yourself to the mast.
