George Eaton: Ed Miliband needs some big ideas to defeat the Tory goliath

Labour’s leader must come up with more persuasive promises if he is to win at the next general election

Image problem: Andrew Marr shows Ed Miliband caricatures of himself as cartoon character Wallace

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28 July 2014

Before David went to meet Goliath he handed back the armour and sword that Saul had equipped him with. “I cannot go in these,” he said, “because I am not used to them.” Instead, the young shepherd armed himself with the stones and slingshot that would fell the giant. Had David fought Goliath as a conventional warrior he would have been crushed. But by abandoning traditional methods he achieved a victory that had appeared impossible.

It is a lesson Ed Miliband, who is fond of citing this Biblical tale in reference to his battles with Rupert Murdoch and the “big six” energy companies, has absorbed. David Axelrod, the Obama strategist hired by Labour, has told him that he will not beat David Cameron (who displays Goliath-like contempt towards Miliband) if he fights him in the manner of a traditional politician — he must challenge him on his own terms.

The Labour leader’s speech last Friday, in which he confronted his image problem, was the clearest account yet of how he intends to do so. He conceded that he would never be as photogenic as Cameron — “I am not going to able to compete with that” — and promised to offer “something different”: an approach defined by “big ideas, principles, decency and empathy”.

Just as he has rejected the 35-year free market consensus on the economy, so Miliband has broken with conventional views of what it means to be a leader. “It’s not about who looks best in a tank, or bustling down the corridors of power,” one strategist told me. “Tony Blair was doing an impression of Bill Clinton, and David Cameron was doing an awful impression of Tony Blair. Ed has no interest in doing an impression of David Cameron.”

Miliband’s subsequent call for a public question time, held at Parliament, was designed to promote a more open, discursive style of leadership that recasts Westminster as a forum of democracy, not political point-scoring.

His interventions have reassured some who privately agonised over “the leadership problem” after repeatedly encountering hostility to Miliband on the doorstep during the May elections. “It cleared the air, and that’s a relief,” one shadow cabinet minister told me. But others fear the change of strategy has come too late in the electoral cycle to make a difference. “Voters make up their minds about a leader of the Opposition in the first 18 months,” one sceptical Labour MP said, “and there’s not much you can do after that.”

For the Conservatives there was an easy riposte to Miliband’s speech. The problem is not that he is bad at photos, but that he has “nothing to say” on the economy — he lacks both style and substance. Miliband, who has announced more policy than any leader of the Opposition in recent history, can be easily cleared of that charge. But the Tories’ attack plays to public uncertainty over what Labour stands for.

Miliband was initially surprised when colleagues told him he lacked definition in the eyes of voters. But as well as facing up to his image problem, his speech acknowledged a failure of communication. “I know that few people will be talking about ‘responsible capitalism’ on the doorstep,” he said in reference to one of his favourite intellectual motifs. “It doesn’t make a great soundbite.”

After this realisation, the Labour leader has begun to change his language. Interviewed by Andrew Marr yesterday, he spoke not of “regulating markets”, still less of “predistribution”, but declared that his “big idea” was to “make this country work once again for ordinary people and not just a few at the top”. Labour’s biggest advantage over the Conservatives remains that it is viewed as the party for “the many, not the few”, while the Tories are still viewed as the “party of the rich”.

But set against this is its continuing weakness on the economy. Having polled behind the Tories on this issue even when there was no growth, Labour’s ratings have plummeted as the recovery has taken hold. The result is that Miliband must now defy political gravity to win the general election.

Labour strategists now acknowledge that they spent too long talking about what they would have done in 2010 rather than outlining a vision for 2015. The party’s new message is that it stands for “big reforms, not big spending”, an attempt both to emphasise the ambition of Miliband’s project and to shed its profligate image. By promising to eliminate the current deficit by the end of the next parliament and reduce the national debt as a share of GDP, Labour has gone further than most think in binding itself to fiscal rectitude. But these pledges, meaningless to most voters, are not enough alone to get the party over the bar of economic credibility.

What Miliband really needs, one MP tells me, is a “fiscal Clause IV moment”: an act that convinces voters that he means what he says about “iron discipline”. If Labour wants the public to believe it would wield the axe, it needs to say more about where it would fall.

But as well as reassuring voters, Miliband must inspire them. The task for his conference speech will be to offer a vision of national renewal. As Roosevelt, Attlee, Wilson, Blair and Obama all understood, the essential currency of progressive politics is hope.

Nine months away from the election, Miliband remains a contender for power owing to his party’s stubborn opinion poll lead. He may yet fall at the final hurdle, but back in 2010 most expected him to already be out of the race. “We have made a series of mistakes collectively because we have always underestimated him [Miliband],” said Eric Pickles recently, in a rare moment of Conservative self-criticism.

The same was true when Miliband stood for the Labour leadership in 2010, a contest most predicted he would lose. Should he again defy convention, he could yet be remembered as the man who defeated two Goliaths named David.

George Eaton is political editor of the New Statesman

George Eaton: Ed Miliband needs some big ideas to defeat the Tory goliath

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