Did Labour get the right brother?

On 25 September 2010 when Ed Miliband won the Labour leadership and stood before his conference (looking more shocked than anyone) he said “My message to the country is this – I know we lost trust, I know we lost touch, I know we need to change.”

On 25 June 2011, a whole nine months later and after a big listening exercise of audience research he told the Labour National Policy Forum much the same thing : “We can only win if we change…..Old Labour forgot about the public. New Labour forgot about the party. And, by the time we left office, we had lost touch with both…..And you know we lost trust, including because of what happened in Iraq.”

During the leadership campaign Ed Miliband also repeatedly said Labour had lost touch with the voters over immigration. He said that again too. So the message today is very much the same as it was last year. And while it is early on in the parliament, and the Labour leader has to leave some big announcements for Labour conference in the autumn there is no shortage of people inside the party who are worried he is not doing enough to define himself, create a new narrative and set of guiding values for post-New, post-Old Labour.

We can’t expect policy yet, mainly because Ed Miliband decided to spend two years on a policy review. We shouldn’t expect big new “hug a huskie” type re-branding campaigns mainly because that is what he criticises David Cameron for. But talk to those people who opposed his election, and who now feel worried about his leadership and there are at least two fundamental things they say Ed Miliband is going to have to go further and deeper on soon.

In his speech in Wales this weekend the Labour leader tackled the party organisation and internal democracy, but he did not tackle the issue that still hangs heavily around him: his own election as leader and the fact he won thanks to union votes, having lost the parliamentary party and ordinary party membership to his older brother David. Again this is something safely tucked away in a review, so he doesn’t have to say anything that would pre-empt that, but some argue he should acknowledge the inadequacies of the system that put him in office, and commit to being re-elected under whatever emerges from the review.

More important to those Labourites to the right of Ed Miliband (can we still call them Blairites?) is finding a way of acknowledging some culpability on the economy without trashing the record of the last government. Many of them now think Gordon Brown did spend too much in the last third of the Labour years, and reject the Ed Miliband/Ed Balls formula that the deficit was essentially all down to the banking crisis and recession.

And even if they agree with the Labour leader and his Shadow Chancellor they believe voters have been persuaded by the Coalition to think otherwise. And if voters are convinced of something, even if they are wrong, the canny strategist finds a way of saying you understand. It is like the advice you often hear given to grooms at weddings in father-in-law speeches : even if you are in the right, if your wife thinks you are wrong say sorry and buy flowers.

David Miliband, according to the leaked copy of the victory speech he never got to make, would have criticised Gordon Brown’s claim to have abolished boom and bust, and also the way he set his own economic rules, and then judged how he was doing himself. This is relatively modest guilt but Ed Miliband will not even go that far, yet.

Off the record, senior Blairites are scathing in their analysis. A former Cabinet Minister told me there was no way Ed Miliband could win the next election, that he needed to admit mistakes on the economy and that he was leading Labour away from the centre ground of politics not towards it. Perhaps amazingly, he still believed David Miliband could succeed his younger brother as leader, but believed the rising popularity of Yvette Cooper was the most likely rival.

On the record former David Miliband supporters are loyal to Ed. But sometimes they cannot hide very well everything they feel. When I asked Caroline Flint if she thought Labour had “got the right brother in the end”, the Shadow Communities Secretary said: “The Labour Party did choose the leader of our party – and in that sense they have made the right choice.”

She is experienced enough to know that does not exactly sound like a big endorsement, merely a touching claim that the party can never be wrong.