by Rob Marchant

With his LSE lecture, David Miliband is back. We should be delighted: not, one would hope, because there are too many partisan squabblers who wanted him to lead the party and can’t accept that he lost, but because we are all grown-ups and he is a huge talent which we cannot afford to waste. But some of his speech is both disturbing, and remarkable, nonetheless.

First, it is disturbing because you realise how constrained he is by the awful combination of filial loyalty and media scrutiny. So, whatever he says needs to be said in a code so opaque that it seems asking the impossible for any speech to break new ground. As Sunder Katwala points out, when talking about British politics he is carefully higlighting points of convergence with his brother, determined not to provide a credit-card-breadth of difference between them.

But these contortions ultimately twist his message. For example, one of the other points of convergence seems to be on the befuddled topic of community organising, which even the more committed members of David’s own campaign team thought its weak point. Much as we try to think otherwise, it is painful to watch David attempt to locate and reinforce these points of brotherly convergence. The ultimate conclusion of all of this must be the obvious one: that it cannot be good for Labour for one of its true remaining heavyweight talents to be thus hobbled; to be neither in the shadow cabinet nor truly enjoying the freedom of the back benches. (more…)