Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

General Election 2015: Ed Miliband's unlikely journey – from hapless geek to heart-throb

In his latest essay on the party leaders, Donald Macintyre is impressed by the assurance of a man who was meant to be Labour's biggest handicap - but has become almost an asset

Donald Macintyre
Wednesday 06 May 2015 10:50 BST
Comments
Fans take a selfie with Ed Miliband in Kempston, near Bedford, on Tuesday
Fans take a selfie with Ed Miliband in Kempston, near Bedford, on Tuesday

Simply by happening to be on the 18.55 train from Chester to Crewe three Saturdays ago Debbie Jackson, 55, may have had more impact on this election than she imagined.

For not only did she have rather more than a walk-on part in the “worst moment” of Ed Miliband’s campaign, but the Labour leader may just have been – albeit indirectly and subconsciously – influenced by her to gamble on agreeing to his now famous interview with Russell Brand.

The “worst moment”, as he jocularly described it later to The Independent’s Andrew Grice, involved Ms Jackson’s adult daughter – who for some reason was passionately keen to photograph the man who could yet be Prime Minister within days – while holding her black dog in his arms. Those who have criticised Miliband for being indecisive might have been surprised to see how emphatically he turned down the proposal. “No,” he said firmly. “No dogs.”

He even reminded everyone of the cautionary scene in The Pink Panther when Peter Sellers is bitten by a dog after asking: “Does your dog bite?” “I thought you said your dog didn’t bite.” “It’s not my dog.” Eventually there was a compromise in which Ms Jackson stood next to Miliband for the picture while holding the mutt herself. “Not too close,” said the Labour leader hastily.

Earlier, on the train, Ms Jackson had been interested that Miliband, his team and the police protection officers assigned for the campaign were in another second-class compartment, saying uneffusively that he was “the best of a bad bunch” and adding breezily that “I hope he bought his ticket and didn’t get it on expenses”.

We had chatted for most of the journey to Crewe about the difficulties she faced, having had to give up her job because of heart trouble when she could have had another 10 years of working, living on £109 a week employment support allowance, her views on Katie Hopkins (“She’s the pits”), and, more counter-intuitively, her enthusiasm for Russell Brand’s promotion of community groups on rehab and housing and for “being not afraid to speak the truth”. The “one thing” Ms Jackson didn’t agree with, she said, was the very exhortation not to bother voting which Brand was spectacularly to abandon more than a fortnight later.

On the way back to London, I mentioned to Miliband that she and, earlier, another mature woman, had spoken of Brand approvingly during the Labour leader’s swing through the North-West. No, The Independent is not taking the credit – or blame –for his later decision to visit Brand, at the latter’s invitation. The campaign team had many weightier factors to ponder in calculating that risk – perhaps the biggest of the campaign. But maybe he registered the point, however negligibly. Either way. Ms Jackson’s vote for Labour looks in the bag after Brand’s endorsement on Monday.

So – possibly – were those of Nicola Braithwaite’s hen party who had mobbed the Labour battlebus in the middle of Chester an hour or so earlier. Ah, the hen party. Only in Britain. Early for the train, the bus had parked outside the Westminster Hotel. One of the 30 hens, nipping outside for a cigarette returned to alert her friends that Miliband was inside the bus. Out they trip, waving and squealing in over-excitement.

Discussions in the bus, in which it’s agreed that Miliband cannot remain aloof from the scene below, “like Howard Hughes in his plane,” as his closest adviser Lord (Stewart) Wood, jokes. Press spokesman Bob Roberts disembarks and negotiates – the outcome being that Ms Braithwaite herself will come in for a selfie. Unbridled applause from the girls.

Having just sat down to chat with Miliband I give up my seat for her. With things – temporarily – a little calmer outside, Roberts obligingly takes the pictures of Nicola with the Labour leader with her iPhone as she explains that she’s from Knutsford, and a solicitor, adding a little mysteriously (cuts in legal aid perhaps?) “that’s why I don’t like the Tories”.

She’s getting married to Howard, an architect, in June. Miliband asks the questions. “What are you doing tonight?” “We’re going on a boat cruise,” says Nicola, adding with a hint of mischief, “I don’t know what’s happening after that.” “What’s Howard doing tonight?” “I don’t know actually. But he’s put money behind the bar, so I’m happy with that.”

Gallantly, Nicola pleads for her friends. “Can’t he just pop his head out?” “We had a deal,” chides Roberts gently. “I know – I’m happy with the deal,” says Nicola before descending from the bus in triumph. But of course Miliband does “pop his head out” standing at the door of the bus.

At which point the ecstatic twentysomething hens turn into something closer to teenage rock fans, chanting “selfie, selfie” and turning their backs on the Labour leader to capture his image with their own. There are cries of “this is amazing” and “hashtag Ed”; Cheshire twitterdom is on fire within minutes. The Chester Chronicle’s David Holmes, who had spent the day following Miliband round the Wirral, had got off the bus in time to video the event from outside. Earlier he told me wistfully that he wished he’d had more time to ask Miliband about his socialist roots, embodied by the Labour leader’s late father Ralph. Instead, he has the hen-party scoop of the day.

Ed Miliband obliges yet another selfie request

This sudden emergence of Miliband as celeb, even semi-heart-throb, has been one of the surprises of the campaign. Certainly the improbable attempts by the Daily Mail among others to depict him as a faithless Lothario by trawling through his fairly unexceptional past love life appear to have decisively backfired in his favour, if the number of people of both sexes accosting him for selfies – or better still to be photographed by an apparently the ever willing members of his entourage in supermarkets or in railway stations – are anything to go by.

Just two years ago, as he travelled through the East Midlands on the eve of the local council elections, there were plenty of people who did not even recognise him. Even then he was strikingly sure – surer perhaps than those around him – that he was going to be Prime Minister this year.

But with fame has come a new, more apparently extrovert, assurance. “He seems a confident guy” said an American student after bumping into him on the train to Worcester on Sunday and having the obligatory if cursory chat about baseball fan Miliband’s favoured Boston Red Sox.

All this has increased popular interest in Miliband the man. At Queensferry in Flintshire in April, Miliband was interviewed by two “Asda mums” Storm Townend and Laura Rishworth on some of the details of everyday life. Both women had brought their young children.

Predictably he stressed the importance of his family life, stressing that spending time “with Justine and the kids” was his main pleasure outside politics. “Whatever happens after 7 May my first duty is to be a good father, If I’m running the country my obligation to my kids is non-negotiable” he said before going on to describe how he told his sons stories about two sheep on the Yorkshire moors – the same ones that Ralph Miliband had told him stories about when they lived outside Leeds. Both women said they had found him especially “human” in the private chats they had after the interview. And both would blog about the experience without committing themselves to voting Labour.

The Asda mums interview was nevertheless a smart move; the network has pull. That Miliband has fought a far better campaign, for all the occasional stumbles, than anyone – opponents or allies – imagined has become a commonplace of election chatter. But it’s also worth remembering what he’s been up against. Even if the new media diversity and the three big television events which have been central to the campaign make the Conservative press less powerful than it was, the newspaper onslaught – including the fairly breathtaking cynicism of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun backing the Tories in England and the SNP in Scotland – has probably been more strident and sometimes more vicious than probably in any election since Neil Kinnock’s defeat in 1992.

Nor it is mainly his fault that he is the first Labour leader in memory to see concerted three-party attack on Labour’s core vote of the sort being mounted by the Greens, Ukip and of course, most devastatingly, the SNP. Yet there is a central contradiction in Nicola Sturgeon’s position: she repeatedly insists that she will do anything in Westminster to help Miliband see off David Cameron, yet she is surely smart enough to know that every time she says so, it helps to drive floating English voters into the Tory camp. Can it be that for all her billing as the refreshing “new politics” star of this election campaign, she realises this and is playing something of a double game?

Most of Miliband’s engagements with English voters are a good deal more everyday than these issues of high politics which are dominating the closing days of the “air war”. While most of those who turn up for his question-and-answer sessions are Labour Party members or supporters, not all are; he operates in a significantly less tightly controlled environment than Cameron.

Ed Miliband speaks to the audience during last week's BBC Question Time special (Getty)

He starts each one by inviting anyone who isn’t a convinced Labour voter to ask him questions, and there is a (modest) take-up. At Pensby High School in the Wirral in mid April, a historically minded accountant called Khaled asked if it isn’t the fate of all previous Labour governments to end with the economy in worse shape than when it began and suggests that businesses do not have confidence in the party. At Tudor Grange Academy in Worcester, a small business owner called Debbie comes straight to the point: “My margins are so squeezed that I can’t possible survive with your pledge to end zero-hours contracts and raise the minimum wage,” she says.

Miliband is polite, answering that Labour has already said it will give businesses “time to adjust”, that it’s trying to help by reducing business rates, that zero-hours contracts employees who do not want to take up the statutory right to a proper contract after 12 weeks don’t have to, but adds that while he makes no criticism of employers such as Debbie he simply doesn’t think “we can carry on with this level of insecurity”.

For the most part however, the issue is rather the opposite one. These sessions reflect intense frustration at the squeeze on public expenditure, and the regular depiction of Miliband as the most left-wing Labour leader of recent times overlooks the extent to which he regularly needs to restrain the expectations of Labour supporters. It’s not just the cri de coeur such as that of Jemima at Tudor Grange – “Worcester woman” being a rather less homogenous creature than John Major’s coinage of the term to suggest the archetypal swing voter suggests – who “can’t understand why Labour is going to go on spending a ridiculous amount of money on nuclear weapons.” (Miliband’s only concession to her that is to say that he is a strong believer in multilateral but not unilateral disarmament.)

Or Trevor Phillips, who asks if he is ready “to renationalise” the energy utilities. Or the man who suggests that he cancels HS2 and helps the rest of the rail network while saving enough money for the NHS to show “a surplus.” No he isn’t – in either case..

It’s also the stream of questions which go beyond Labour’s public pledges about cutbacks in the youth service (without promising not to make further cuts in local authority spending he says he does not want to see local government as a “soft touch”) or the growing mismatch between supply and demand of social workers, or the crying need for greater spending on child mental health. And so on. Miliband’s approach, inevitably, is repeatedly to express the sympathy he undoubtedly feels but say he would rather be the Prime Minister “who under-promises and over-delivers, rather than one who over-promises and under-delivers.”

For the party faithful he ends with basically the same cheery “get the vote out” shtick – sometimes several times a day: “If you’ve got any DIY to do in the next four days put it off. Between now and Thursday there’s a huge amount to do.” Certainly his own schedule has been – and will be in the last 48 hours – punishing enough. According to his team his wife Justine pays a vital part ensuring he gets around six hours sleep. Banned by them from reading Twitter, he was a little worried about the reaction to his trip as he left the stage on Thursday night until he realised that “it was Justine who was on the phone making sure he would be calm and ready for sleep when he got home,” says one aide.

It was not in the Conservative script six months or even six weeks ago that Miliband would still be neck and neck with Cameron this far into the election. That he is still a contender says something about his toughness, just as coming from behind in what proved a fraternally damaging contest with his brother did five years ago. Interestingly, in a little noticed sequence in campaign profile made by ITV News’s Tom Bradby, Miliband goes further than before in saying that his decision to run – about which close allies say Justine was a crucial factor in calming his “angst” – was a fundamentally political one.

In other words he was saying in effect what he felt he could not say at the time, namely that it was about “moving on from New Labour.” This is in keeping with the long held view he has shared with his close adviser Stewart Wood that there is an opportunity to move forward into a social-democratic era, rather as the Thatcher settlement replaced the Attlee one. It’s ironic that the most electorally threatening obstacle to his potential victory, the SNP’s huge success in Scotland, may be reflecting that same current. There are serious problems ahead. Labour is worried that Cameron’s intention to stay in office and claim victory if his is the largest priority and try and get through a Queen’s Speech may severely test the party’s discipline in the face of another press onslaught on the idea of a “coalition of losers”.

It makes huge sense to do the thing Miliband resolutely won’t talk about until the polls close and seek a coalition with a Lib Dem party many of whose activists are deeply apprehensive about the idea of a second coalition with the Tories. But Miliband has withstood huge pressures already. There is no reason to doubt that the qualities he has shown in this campaign would also serve him well as a Prime Minister.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in