Hard Labour: Ed Miliband

Ed Miliband spoke in York on Friday night

There are two reasons why everyone should be interested in Ed Miliband. One, he is young enough to politically survive two David Cameron governments and be a big player in a Labour revival. Two, along with Ed Balls, he is Gordon Brown’s closest aide.

There is possibly another. “I have this much more famous brother. Some of you may know of him – he’s the foreign secretary. He’s very grown up,” he joked.

If Ed were a movie star, he’d be Joaquin Phoenix. Devilishly good-looking, successful from the word go, and trying to escape the shadow of his brother (whom Blair once described as “my Wayne Rooney”).

“The people at Sky News produce this top trumps pack. It rates various politicians on various attributes and my brother and I were both rated in this thing. On parliamentary skills I lost to him and I thought 'that’s okay, he’s been in parliament longer than I have'. But on charisma I lost to him and on looks I lost to him. I think Sky News is a bit of a rightwing conspiracy because George Osbourne beat us on all three," he told a packed hall on Friday night.

Never believe a politician when they say they are ordinary. By the age of 25 he was a researcher for Gordon Brown and now at 37 he is on the front bench. He is disarming and affable, with sharp eyes and an ill-concealed posh voice. Sometimes it seems that Tony is everywhere these days.

Like Blair in 1992, Ed was straight out after an election humiliation, speaking the language of change on Friday night.

“People are fed up of Punch and Judy politics. [It's the orthodoxy] to pretend that you're perfect. None of us pretend in our own lives that we're perfect. We need a more grown-up style of politics. Grown-up politics means we can admit we make mistakes. Politicians become incredibly paranoid about saying anything which might be the slightest bit out of sync with the party line - and I think that massively turns people off politics."

He chatted his way through ideas for a new manifesto, calling for engagement with globalisation, fairness and idealism.

"It's got to be about idealism. It's got to be about changing the sort of society you're living in. If I thought politics was simply about coming in to manage the system slightly better than David Cameron or his colleagues, I just don’t think it would be worth being part of it,” he said.

There was, of course, a healthy dose of hypocrisy in his impressive performance. York students peppered Ed on 42-day detention and pooled European sovereignty. It was hard to see the inherent “fairness” in either. After outlining the problem of oil companies taking billions of pounds of profit during inflation he simply said: "I'm not going to tell you what the answers are to any of those issues, but I think the answers are really difficult."

In some ways Ed is a breath of fresh air. He freely admits it when he doesn’t know the answer and is willing to concede, God forbid, that the Conservatives are sometimes right. This is strictly un-Labour; one ought to steal Tory policy and then deny it.

He also touched on an "exciting message" which Labour had to deliver to voters. He talked, for example, about installing a carbon economy: "A big revolution is coming to government and our economy on climate change, because just like we have financial budgets we're soon going to have five year carbon budgets. That is going to have a massive effect on the way we organise our economy."

But in other ways he completely missed the point. His bright optimism betrayed the fact that Labour had just suffered its worst local election defeat in 40 years. David Cameron is hardly preaching unfairness, pessimism and disengagement with globalisation is he? His joke was more poignant than he realised: “I’ve got to stop saying that Cameron is right.”

So don't be too taken by Miliband's fervent cry for a new style of politics. While admitting that it was a "mistake" to let the snap-election speculation go on so long, there was no hint of an apology - that perhaps he and Brown had put party tactics above voter interests. When it came to the question of the £50 billion deficit, he simply didn't see anything wrong with it. On other direct questions a simple "It's a difficult one" often sufficed.

It’s early days for Ed. One wonders how much of what he says he believes and how much is defending the government. We probably won’t see the real Ed Miliband until after Gordon’s government has lost its last disk. But he can afford to wait it out. He’s 37, on the front-bench and as we saw on Friday, is willing to take Blair-style and Brownite policy into the future.

Just maybe, one day, we may be huddled around a TV watching him as Labour leader say: “Hand on my heart – it’s a difficult one.”

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