It’s time for Ed Miliband to reach beyond the converted

As Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's former chief of staff, writes in his new memoir of power politics, this is the debut that Westminster's alpha males secretly dread. He recalls the outwardly brassy Blair being "extremely nervous before his first encounter with Michael Howard in 2003", convinced that he would be revealed as inadequate.

For a man who has prospered more by emphasising what he is not than what he intends to be, Mr Miliband's pressing task is definition. As one veteran of the New Labour years says, he may "already have wasted that with his victory address — it spent nearly an hour telling us what he wasn't".

Outside Labour's self-lacerating circles, of course, no one cares. They want to know what you are, and if they can't figure it out, they lose interest pretty quickly.

The sight of Ed the Unready, blinking, stunned at his own success and with his first word as leader being "Conference!", was enough to confirm to many fears that the party has ended up with a candidate who is narrowcasting to his own tribe rather than those beyond it.

The same trap now beckons in a period when being in Opposition will bring some short-term gains but probably not much more.

It is all too easy to lambast the Government for raising the threshold on university fees and child-benefit cuts. And thousands of public-sector interest groups will bend Miliband's ear to take up their cause when George Osborne wields his spending cudgel next week.That is not, however, a strategy for returning Labour to power.

So he needs to establish precisely why the "squeezed middle" in the southern and Midland seats which Labour shed since 2005 should see their interests more reflected in his vision of their future than in the Coalition's.

The ghosts of Kinnockry loom large in the recent wishful thinking of "return to growth", while ignoring the daily drain on the economy's resources of servicing a vast debt.

In fairness to Mr Miliband, he has passed two early tests: quashing Ed Balls's pitch to be his economic mastermind and signalling, in the choice of Alan Johnson as shadow chancellor, that he is interested in a middle way rather than Mr Balls's rigid deficit denial.

But Mr Johnson will also need grit to show that he is not yet another post-Blair Labourite who is truly happiest preaching state spending and high taxation as the gospel.

In aides such as Stewart Wood, a former economic don, Mr Miliband has intelligent counsel. But there is a whiff of unreconstructed social democracy about his team and its preoccupations.

Who is Ed's Centre-Right voice, nagging him to see the other side of a conundrum or to look at a counter-intuitive policy option?

Opposing Lord Browne's plan to raise the cap on tuition fees might look like a smart play to his beloved "squeezed middle". Alas, to judge by John Denham's response, it is purely reactive and
complaining.

Like myself, Ed and his brother were beneficiaries of a top university education at a time when public funds could still be plundered to pay for it. Even then, the system was running out of resource. If he wants true excellence in higher education, with all that means for UK plc, it is foolish to rule out any element of discretion in what universities may charge.

Indeed, education is the area where, as far as I can see, Mr Miliband has thought least about his offer to the public. I asked him recently if he would accept private-sector funding in the state system if it would enhance performance and outcomes. His answer was: "No, because it would change the entire nature of schooling." Well, precisely so. But (unless he has reconsidered) this is an extraordinary retrenchment against New Labour thinking, and not one most parents looking for advancement for their children would accept.

We should not forget, though, when we watch him take on the PM today, that the younger Miliband is where he is because, like Blair and Cameron, he saw a tiny gap of opportunity and squeezed through it.

You can't really doubt the cunning or nerve of a man who was prepared to force his brother into the great afterlife of lecture tours in order to seize the mantle of power.

His great chance lies in the changeability of British politics — a coalition in which the Lib-Dems are being asked to swallow vast humiliation on university fees and deficit cuts and the Tories aspire to the radicalism of Margaret Thatcher while somehow hoping that we will all pull together in the Big Society and thank them for it.

There is no guarantee that this is the way it will work out. Mr Miliband, who likes dividing the country into earnings deciles, believes there is more strain between upper and lower Middle Britain than either the Tories or the Blairites were prepared to accept.

He might even be right on this — the idea that we are "all in it together", with similar interests and objectives, sounds more threadbare the more it becomes a slogan.

What doesn't change, though, is the lesson that Jonathan Powell derives from Machiavelli as the nub of leadership: "Opportunity would have offered itself in vain, had the capacity for turning it to account been wanting."

In other words: don't bank on the laurels of early success: it's what you do with it that counts, mate.

Loath as Ed might be to take advice from the Prince via a Blairite emissary, if Mr Miliband intends to be more than punctuation in the Labour story, it's not a bad place to start.