Brothers at Arms
The opening chapter of this book could easily — and happily — be the synopsis of a great Second World War novel. “Ralph, the Jewish protagonist, walks sixty miles with his father to catch the last ferry from Belgium to England in order to escape the encroaching Nazis. His wife remains in Belgium while he begins to carve out a new life in England. Tension grows as his new home successively turns down his applications for citizenship. Eventually, when granted indefinite leave to remain, he becomes the most prominent Marxist academic in the country and makes Britain his home with his wife and young family.” Such is the drama in the life of Ralph Miliband. Against this backdrop, the precocious yet predictable lives of his sons could only disappoint.
Soon, this book’s real protagonist enters the main stage. Inevitably, given the proximity of their birth and the similarity of their progress through education and the Labour ranks, his appearances are matched constantly by his elder brother, David (in whose shadow, one feels throughout this book, Ed had always felt). Their careers began in earnest at London’s Haverstock School, before David and later Ed attended Corpus Christi, Oxford to study Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE). Their mechanical careers — as if the output of a social democratic factory — matched each other almost perfectly. Later, David studied for a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a direction Ed would also follow when he spent a year at Harvard. Both returned from America and made their way through the world of Westminster’s Special Advisors (SpAds) and into the House of Commons before sitting together at Gordon Brown’s Cabinet.
On the basis of the preceding paragraph, one could skip the majority of this book. Not that these pages shouldn’t be there – I dare say the formative years of Mili-E and Mili-D, as many came to refer to them during the leadership contest, are important to understanding the men today. But this story is predictable, building up to the inevitable conflict that finally materialised in the summer of 2010.
The commentary does little to ameliorate the inevitability of much of the initial pages of this book. That which we receive comes on the backs of the numerous interviews this book’s authors, Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre, conducted with the figures who have shaped the brothers’ lives. However, while the input of broadly unknown figures may be of interest to some, their contributions are largely fruitless when forming a holistic image of the brothers. After all, so many of the figures that shaped their lives are a consequence of their father’s left-wing contacts and few of them are well known, even in the political world. Those that are well known, on the other hand, hold obvious bias. The noble task of interviewing so many people does this book little service. A more factual account, while inevitably slimmer and less well articulated, could have permitted the reader to form his own opinions.
Using the bedrock of facts as the basis for opinion, some aspects of Ed’s rise to the top and the people he has taken with him can teach us a lot, especially about his approach to building a political team. When Ed was seconded from Harriet Harman’s office to work for Shadow Chancellor Gordon Brown, he worked alongside Ed Balls (the current Shadow Chancellor), Yvette Cooper (Balls’ wife and currently Shadow Home Secretary) and Douglas Alexander (Ed’s Shadow Foreign Secretary). Between the four of them, they shadow the four key offices of state. This could suggest one or both of two things: First, if Ed views anything as family, it is his political clique rather than his brother; second, Ed has failed to transcend the Blair-Brown divide beyond which he claimed he could take Labour. Rarely has such a ridiculous claim been made as his statement to move beyond New Labour — Ed and his team are not moving beyond the divides of 1994-2010, they are simply evidence of Team Brown’s victory.
Where this book really does come into its own is with the leadership election that created the “dysfunctional relationship” that persists between the two brothers. The key point of contention in this section, which throws into question so much about the character of Ed, is when he decided to run for the leadership of the Labour Party. According to Ed, when David announced that he would stand the day after Gordon Brown resigned as Prime Minister, he had yet to make up his mind whether to run. Though yet to make up his mind, he had already sought the support of former cabinet colleagues Hilary Benn and Peter Hain. And he had clearly been giving significant thought to the matter when he sought the advice of Lord Kinnock in January 2010 and the support of an adviser in Brown’s team in the dying days of his government. On top of Ed’s apparent misleading statement about the timing of his decision, the question of whether Ed ever drove to David’s house to tell him he was running has also been a point of dispute between the two. David continues to deny that any such meeting ever took place. Why would David lie? And why, for that matter, would Ed? There are some things that only brothers know — this is one of them — but there are some things we can all infer from such controversies.
On the back of this review, many people may feel that the act of political fratricide that Ed committed against his elder brother is intolerable and renders him unfit for Prime Minister. There may be something to this — we must all be left asking what we think of a man whose brotherly bonds seemingly mean so little to him. But what shines through this book is that we ought never to have doubted the ability of the younger Miliband to win against his brother and we certainly never should have felt that David was the obvious successor to Brown. In this context, the fratricide is less one-directional. But the lasting point of this book, written by two Labour-supporting members of the British commentariat, is a moderately convincing case for this man to lead the Labour Party and the country (at least, relative to Labour’s other figures). However, the credibility gap between their portrayal and the man we see on our television screens — the awkward man, winning on the backs of the unions, promoting his old friends, repeating phrases over and over again, and rarely laying a punch on Prime Minister David Cameron during Prime Ministers’ Questions — is not Prime Minister material. If this book is right, then ‘Prime Minister Miliband’ is a long way off.
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