Afternoon:
10°c
Until last week, it was my private theory that many in Labour not only expected to lose the next election but actually wanted to do so. How else could you explain the party's utter quiescence in the face of approaching disaster?
Labour's fatalism seemed to me partly due to exhaustion, physical and intellectual, after 11 years in power. Partly it was that they'd forgotten how to handle adversity. More than either of these, however, it felt to me like shame.
If you were a bright young Labour MP elected in 1997 on a tide of hope, can you ever have imagined that you'd end up voting to take money away from the poorest taxpayers, voting to cushion the foreign rich, voting to lock up without charge people with vowels at the end of their names? Did you expect that your government would end up in league with torturers? Did you really think that it would have committed British troops to a futile military operation in Afghanistan that has already lasted longer than the Second World War, with no end in sight?
Some, perhaps many, Labour Party members and MPs have lost all hope in their party and government. They are ashamed of it. They feel it deserves to lose, and it does.
But the Tories still have to climb an electoral Kilimanjaro, using constituency boundaries biased against them. They still haven't convincingly explained how they will put their attractive ideas about localism and voluntarism into practice. They can't say how the work of one inspirational Camilla Batmanghelidjh can be scaled up to cover a nation. Labour's defeat is not inevitable.
So it was more than useful last Wednesday when the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, reminded us of this. Among a leader's roles is to convey confidence and hope. This is one of the things at which Gordon Brown is most hopeless: Miliband had a decent try.
Whatever the polls may say, a Milibid for the top job, now clearly on the cards, has a chance of helping Labour. Leadership contests are not always damaging or divisive; the Tories benefited greatly from their last one. Nor am I sure a new leader would need to hold an immediate (and thus probably suicidal) general election. He could plausibly claim time to implement new policies.
But there do need to be those new policies. A leadership change alone may be necessary, but it is far from sufficient. We still know little of how Miliband would change New Labour's most despicable features.
And that vagueness in the Milibid means that it is already being claimed by Labour's discredited Blairite wing - which in turn means it is viewed with suspicion by the unions and the principled Left, represented by figures such as the London MP Jon Cruddas.
In fact, it is very far from clear that Miliband, who talks explicitly about reducing inequalities of wealth, is actually a Blairite. Gordon Brown, in the words of Tony Blair's leaked critique yesterday, "junked the TB policy agenda but had nothing to put in its place". If he is to prevail, Miliband needs to follow the first half of that prescription, but not the second.
