On a grey Saturday morning, five days before polling day, former Labour leader Ed Miliband unveiled the most ill-judged publicity stunt of the general election.
The Ed Stone, an 8ft 6in, two-tonne slab of limestone, with Labour’s six key election pledges carved into its surface, was designed to persuade the public that Miliband was serious about delivering on his promises in government.
“They’re carved in stone because they won’t be abandoned after the general election,” said Miliband, standing in front of the stone in a car park in Hastings. “I want the British people to remember these pledges, to remind us of these pledges, to insist on these pledges.”
The ridicule was instantaneous.
Michael Dugher, the then shadow transport minister, called the stone – which cost a reported £30,000 to produce – a “balls-up ... a 12ft, granite, marble, cock-up”. Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said it was “some weird commie slab”, and Lucy Powell, then the vice-chair of Labour’s campaign, added to the party’s woes when she told 5 Live: “I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the fact that he’s carved them in stone means he’s absolutely not going to break them or anything like that.”
If Labour had won the general election, the stone would have taken its place proudly in the garden of No 10 Downing Street. When instead, they ended up with 26 seats fewer and saw the Conservative party win an unexpected majority, thoughts turned to plans for the stone’s disposal.
But by then the media had become so preoccupied with the Ed Stone’s whereabouts that the destruction of the stone had to be postponed. The Daily Telegraph contacted 50 masonry firms in their search for the stone, while the Sun set up a hotline for any information. The Daily Mail offered a case of champagne to anyone who could confirm the Ed Stone’s location.
The Guardian eventually tracked the stone down to a warehouse in south London, owned by Paye Stonework & Masonry Ltd. Asked, in June, if there were any plans to move it from the warehouse, the firm’s chief executive Adrian Paye told the Daily Mail: “It’s a storage facility. We keep things there until people ask to have them moved.”
Some claim the stone has still not been moved, condemned to live out the rest of its days in a warehouse in Woolwich. But a former Labour MP for Glasgow South, Tom Harris, says a well-placed source told him the stone had been destroyed. “My understanding is that more than one person, each with a sledgehammer, were involved. I also understand it was carried out in anger and panic,” he told the Guardian.
Last month, the People’s History Museum in Manchester, home to an archive of Labour-party history, made tentative inquiries into acquiring the stone for its collection – which includes the coat Michael Foot wore at the cenotaph in 1981 – but everybody they spoke to denied any knowledge of the Ed Stone’s fate. (The museum has also had internal discussions about acquiring the copy of Mao’s Little Red Book that shadow chancellor John McDonnell threw across the Commons chamber at George Osborne.)
A senior Labour source told the Guardian: “All requests for comments on this matter will be met with stony silence.”
The mystery of the Ed Stone will live on in to 2016 – where did it find its final resting place? And how did the idea pass through 10 planning meetings, attended by well-paid communications professionals?
