by Rob Marchant
The most important news about David Miliband’s departure is, of course, that it is by no means news.
Journalists were last week making all kinds of wild claims, that this would somehow upset the delicate balance between Miliband’s core team and the remaining Blairites in the cabinet, as if the latter’s secret leader had suddenly been whisked away in the midst of plotting revolution.
The truth is more mundane, of course: Miliband senior was hardly, at this point, at least, the ringleader of some turbulent band of plotting Blairites. He was merely decently trying to stay out of everyone’s way and put together an alternative political life, in which he was not constantly examined for signs of fraternal betrayal. In his decision to emigrate, he has merely been a grown-up and recognised his own failure in that most impossible of tasks. What would have been extraordinary news would have been for him to accept a place in his brother’s cabinet. The die was cast in October 2010; this is just the inevitable endgame.
Where it leaves us, let’s be honest, is exactly where we were before: in a world where the big beasts who bestrode earlier generations are all but extinct.
This is ever more tricky in a world where politicians do not have what Denis Healey’s wife, Edna called “hinterland”. As the great man told Rafael Behr in a recent interview:
“None of them have that in either party. In my time, people didn’t start earning money until well into their life in politics. Now people can get a career out of politics as soon as they leave university. They don’t have experience of the real world.”
Indeed, this phenomenon is not just confined to Labour – after all, aside from Ken Clarke, who has Cameron got in the “silverback” category? – but if we want to win and win properly, we need to act with a little more mature wisdom than the prime minister has over the last twelve months.
