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LRB blog

Farewell, David Miliband

Edward Pearce

We have been here before. I blogged unkind things about David Miliband when he was being log-rolled by the Blairite machine, as bathed in the blood of Tony, so brilliant, so cool, so je ne sais quoi as to be very nigh compulsory.

The reality, when he didn't get the assured leadership, has been a sulking minimalist in the Commons, above all that low, grinding trouble.

Compare Margaret Beckett, his predecessor at the Foreign Office, chasing the palm, but enjoying the dust. She was avid, slippery, ultra-left in the 1960s, many-sided, hard-working, a useful pragmatist when demanding jobs came in sight – a proper politician.

Yesterday's flight to New York is Miliband's self-pity gone public. 'You'll be sorry when I'm dead.'

Anyway what are we supposed to be losing? He is spa water gone luke-warm, ex-sparkling, feeble by pre-emption. His career took off courtesy of Gordon Brown demonstrating outreach to prime Blair material. Miliband was able to run as precisely that in the leadership election.

Today, with the door open to major front bench responsibility, he is unwilling to serve the party that didn't crown him. The sulking minimalist in the Commons disdains the Cabinet. In truth David Miliband is too small for serious politics.

miliband

Comments

  • 27 March 2013 at 3:20pm
    streetsj says:
    ouch!
  • 27 March 2013 at 3:26pm
    SpinningHugo says:
    Sheesh. Sour hardly covers this.

    'Sulking minimalist' was not such a good line as to require repetition either.
  • 27 March 2013 at 7:46pm
    Claude Lorrain says:
    Tend to agree with this assessment (never liked DM myself), but apparently many in the PLP, wider Party, and MSM would not. Given that for many of these he was the 'king-in-waiting' of the blairite-right one wonders what socio-psychological impact his departure will have on the Party - especially as, at the same time - potentially threatening challenges seem to be emerging on the left.
  • 29 March 2013 at 5:20am
    gareth mac says:
    One must assume that it's personal then. Because you assessment doesn't stand up to srutiny as the Labour Party are desperate for heavyweights to add gravitas to a party which still seems to rely on Ed Balls schoolboy tactics for headlines and don't seem capable of reigining him in thereby undermining the party's claims to provide serious opposition. Even UKIP is getting mentioned in political debate as an alternative which speaks volumes. Where are all the grown-ups; oh they appear to be going abroad.
  • 30 March 2013 at 11:41am
    Joe says:
    Is this the same Mr Pearce that told Liverpudlians in 1989 that "a good and sufficient number of you behave like animals" - or was that just a more famous namesake?