by Rob Marchant
It’s been a pretty good conference. It started on Sunday with both Miliband and Balls saying sensible, pleasingly non-contradictory things on splitting the banks and a bottom-up spending review (if only Harriet Harman had got the memo).
If we merely smile patiently at Len McCluskey’s “throw out the Blairites” sabre-rattling, and nod appreciatively at Miliband’s firmness in rebutting them, there was really only one cloud on Sunday’s horizon: the mad decision – for it is difficult to describe it as anything else – by the party to extend the quotas in its already-contorted selection processes for MPs. A bewildered delegate might have been forgiven for having missed the part where it was proven beyond doubt that their usually painfully right-on party was systematically trying to block gay, disabled and working class people from being candidates. But more of that later.
Balls on Monday was on good form, doing everything in his power to look like a Brown Mk I Iron Chancellor rather than a flare-wearing tax-and-spender from the 70s: perhaps less policy specifics than we might like, but a solid, combative performance nevertheless.
Then yesterday there was the very smart enlisting of Seb Coe to spread a bit of Olympic love, with the added benefit of leaving an impression that was centrist, non-partisan and statesmanlike. And finally there was the speech. It could have been a repeat of last year’s conference: a much-mocked, divisive and rather inward-looking speech – it wasn’t. Yes, it was occasionally cheesy, but it was a Miliband far more at ease with himself. He isn’t great with a teleprompter, but he really was without notes.
It was a speech which reached out to country rather than party; which tapped the Danny Boyle moment of the Olympics opening ceremony; and which rather effectively rubbed salt in Cameron’s wounds. It was the speech of a man who has woken up halfway into a parliamentary term and realised that if he is serious about winning, then he needs to, er, get serious about winning.
It was low on policy, admittedly, and that could yet be a problem – the next one will be eighteen months from an election. But it was a hugely more assured delivery, and that counted for a lot. Most of all, with its blue background, its quoting of Disraeli and its one nation theme – the imagery all screamed “centre ground”, a clear pre-requisite for looking like a prime minister.
After all, as Paul Richards cleverly noted, Disraeli is what Miliband wants to be – a British, Jewish PM.
At last: the penny-drop realisation of what many of us have been patiently repeating for the last two years: you do not have to be a quasi-Tory to believe that it is essentially Tory, and not Liberal, switchers who will win Labour an election. A very good speech, and perhaps even a great one.
In fact, the whole conference nicely gave the lie to what the Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh said about Miliband’s party on Monday morning: that it was “irrelevant, pointless and doomed”. But, two-and-a-half years in, where does that all leave us? In good shape, or is it true that, as Matthew Norman suggests, our “half-time lead counts for nothing”?
Well, yes and no. We are in the game now whereas, a year ago, we really weren’t. But if you want to be prime minister, you need to cover a few bases. You need a credible policy programme. A credible front bench team behind you. An electoral machine capable of maximising your support in the country. And people need to be able to connect with you, visualise you as Prime Minister, but even that can be worked on (it’s practice, like everything: Harold Wilson, who became renowned for his wit, was famously “not funny” as a junior politician).
But there is a but,. Kavanagh was quite right about one thing: the state of his party is one of the biggest things which stands between Miliband and Number 10, if only he could see it. All the others he is aware of, and mostly trying to address. But not this.
