How to Be in Opposition
Edward Pearce
'If Ed Miliband doesn't provide more direction for his party and more definition for himself,’ Mary Ann Sieghart writes in today’s Independent, ‘he is in danger of ending up like William Hague.' She doesn’t mean he’ll be foreign secretary one day; rather that he stands no chance of being prime minister unless he manages to ‘project a political personality that engages voters’ imagination’. ‘People want to know what type of person he is and what motivates him,’ she says. Newspaper columnists have been complaining about Miliband along these lines since before he was elected Labour leader. And they couldn’t be more wrong.
Hague’s problem was that he was too well defined: as a Euro-basher, as a Thatcherite zealot, and as not Kenneth Clarke (the most popular Conservative nationally). Blair’s merits in opposition – his only merits, as it turned out – lay in nice manners and a shimmering anonymity. The mighty shift to the right was layered over with vagueness and TV charm: from the point of view of gaining power, exactly the right thing to do. Miliband is not as clever as Mary Ann Sieghart, but he’s clever enough to know that tedious clichés got that way by being right: governments lose elections; oppositions simply have to keep their noses clean, make no unnecessary enemies and let the follies and misfortunes of their opponents carry them across the Commons floor – work on which the coalition is well ahead of schedule.
Comments
(And is anyone as clever as Mary Ann Sieghart?)
Re cliche, what Nietzsche said is that some truths are so banal that they deserve to become cliches the moment they're first expressed, which doesn't make them less true but slam-dunks them on value. To conclude, therefore, that a cliche may tell us 'all' we need to know about a subject is to jettison the sole faculty that separates human beings from Stanley Fish, which isn't reason but discrimination.
Beazley's next plan was to ape the government, playing "I can be more rightwing than you" - this is just another brand of shimmering anonymity, I think, and it didn't work either. Labor lost the next one because its leader was a loon, but it finally won in 2007 with a candidate brimming with ideas, policies and character. Within a week of becoming PM he had morphed into a featureless robot with no personality to speak of and no courage of his convictions beyond soundbites and cliches. So his party rolled him.
The moral of the story is: have some ideas, communicate them effectively, and don't wait for the other guy to make a mistake. This goes for Ed too, which is why he is disappointing so many people.