David Miliband
The Foreign Secretary is in trouble with Cameron over remarks made about a Polish politician who leads the gouping which the Tories have joined in the European Parliament. After the Chief Rabbi of Poland waded in and said Miliband got it wrong Cameron has demanded, but will not get, an apology.
David Miliband is not a good Foreign Secretary. He carries too much baggage. Of course we know and share the distress at the toll on his family of the inhumanities of the past and admire the new dawn he and his brother Ed bring to their own story. But Europe is blotched everywyhere with scars from the last century and Europe’s story is that its people, all of them, have embraced each other and moved on to their own new dawn, which brings sunlight to us all. It gives the terrible sufferings and heroic sacrifices of the past meaning. Meaning heals.
It is in the East that the scars are still tender and the tensions not yet fully eased. In the eastern lands of the EU and Russia’s near abroad, a healing hand, not a heavy one is needed. David’s rush to Georgia while the muzzles of the guns of that hot headed country’s shattered army remained still warm was very ill advised. John Humphrys reduced him to incoherence in an epic interview about this on Today.
There are shell shocked remnants of the Blair New Labour dream, especially in the media, who think the Millibands are Labour’s best hope for the future. I am not so sure. Labour’s best hope is to reconnect with its working class roots, left open to the Lib Dems or where racial tensions add to the difficulties, the BNP. Even Cameron is making inroads. What labour needs is not a leader who is too professional, nor too wooden. It needs a good bloke who understands what it is like to be disadvantaged by birth and can reconnect with the mass of the country’s workforce and with the Trades Unions. Alan Johnson.
But before that can happen, indeed anything can happen, we have to watch for the next move of the slickest operator of all, the most powerful politician in the country today, Lord Mandelson.