What will Ed be?

The Conservatives, as they gather for their conference in Birmingham, would do well not to underestimate Ed Miliband. He is shrewdly claiming that there is a generational difference between himself and David Cameron. That is fertile territory. Indeed, he contrasted his optimism with Mr Cameron’s pessimism. Of late, because of personal circumstances, Mr Cameron has been rather distant from the fray, as if he were somehow above the vulgarities of the daily grind of politics. The challenge now for him, as he returns to battle, is to show that he is the new-style compassionate Conservative he claims to be. However he positions himself, he has in Ed Miliband a dangerous, charismatic and ruthless opponent. He was the high-risk choice for Labour. The party will be hoping that, in time, he will bring it high rewards. – The New Statesman

Yet there is a catch: those who have known Mr Miliband for a while speak of his empathy, his easy-going nature and his openness to others. Conservative friends admit that he is “human” and “thoughtful”. When he worked at the Treasury, he was always the one willing to consider points of view that did not fit with the orthodoxy as determined by Gordon Brown and Ed Balls. He was Nice Ed. Even Tony Blair was polite about him in his memoirs. As I followed him around the Labour conference this week, the new leader’s humour never slipped; there was none of the surliness of Gordon Brown or the snooty froideurthat his brother tended to show in unguarded moments. Indeed, it was precisely because Ed was the nice one that his decision to stand against his brother, run a thuggish campaign against him, and then disown him from the stage over Iraq took so many aback. This darker, more cut-throat side of his personality had never been obvious before, even if his willingness to be a party to the brutality of the Brown operation was a clue. – The Telegraph

Ed Miliband showed a streak of ruthlessness when he sacked the veteran Brownite Nick Brown as chief whip, but the organisation around the new leader is barely embryonic, and David Miliband’s departure has created a potentially dangerous moment. That can only be confronted by reinforcing the message of change that was the theme of his campaign. One obvious way to do that would be to give the shadow chancellor brief to Ed Balls, who has shifted the national economic debate by hammering home the threat to the economy from slash-and-burn austerity, ahead of the coalition cuts bonanza due to be unveiled next month. The importance of consolidating Labour’s new course should be clear enough. For all Ed Miliband’s studied caution and moderation, his election marks an unmistakable breach in the stifling neoliberal consensus that has dominated British politics since the early 1990s. – The Guardian

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The speech

This was a whole new style of speech-making. Labour at last has a leader who shops at H&M rather than Marks & Sparks. He sounded nervous at times and tripped over a few lines. But when it came to the big moments, the high Cs of political rhetoric, he hit the note. This speech’s real purpose, a job on the myths peddled by the right-wing press, was tackled head on. He made clear he would have no truck with irresponsible strikes – and was reassuringly responsible about the deficit. – The Mirror

Miliband, who on Saturday bested his brother, former foreign minister David Miliband, to earn Labor’s top job, sought to distance himself at the party’s conference in Manchester from the pro-business, pro-American platform of “new Labor” forged by Tony Blair in the 1990s. At the same time, he signaled that he, too, would position himself as political centrist and was by no means endorsing a return to the days when Labor politics were closely identified with violent union strikes. – Washington Post

SOME LABOUR delegates were clearly deflated leaving the hall yesterday: some are still not reconciled to having Ed Miliband as leader; some were irritated by the way in which he denigrated New Labour’s history; others had gone into the Manchester hall with expectations that were not deliverable in the first place. Labour has still not come to terms with life in opposition. Miliband did well, if not brilliantly. The delivery was pedestrian in parts; too pedestrian to lift the thousands sitting in front of me. Too often, he seemed to regard the applause, when it did come, as an interruption to his oration, rather than a tribute. Too often, the speech seemed to include paragraphs dropped in specifically to neutralise a particular constituency. – The Irish TImes

Labour’s new leader did exactly what he needed to. Miliband, virtually unknown off the Westminster stage, had to give the public a sense of himself. The passages on his parents’ persecution at the hands of the Nazis were useful in providing a political back story, something he did far more successfully than Gordon Brown (no mean feat when your father was a Marxist intellectual, not a protestant minister). Still, it’s hard to plead strong family ties when you’ve just knifed your elder brother in the back. – City AM

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