Yesterday, I saw four different David Milibands.
First, the man himself. Walking along the road outside Parliament, looking a bit hot, but otherwise relaxed. We nodded, but he had a posse of aides with him and didn’t break stride for me.
Second, we saw David Miliband the former foreign secretary. After the prime minister had made his statement to the Commons about the EU Council, Miliband asked a couple of quite technical and forensic questions about the wider European context of the Greek bailout. Sitting three rows behind his brother, they happened to have chosen very similar purple ties, and the resemblance between them (and all the politics it represents) was all the more evident.
Third, David Miliband the university lecturer and academic. He ducked out of the House of Lords reform debate to speak at a debate marking the tenth anniversary of 9/11 at the Royal Geographical Society. Here, he was no longer a politician. Speaking in his shirtsleeves without notes and without a lectern, he was clear, concise and insightful in his reading of the world in the decade since the attacks on the World Trade Center – what he termed a “decade of disorder and disorientation”. His speech was perfectly pitched, setting out the macro situation which was then filled in in more detail by various military and diplomatic specialists. I found myself thinking that depending on what happens in the Labour party over the next few months and years, David Miliband could have a very successful career as an academic and pundit.
Fourth, there was David Miliband the Labour attack dog. Very rarely given an outing these days, he employed this persona during his speech in the House of Lords reform debate, which he dashed back to the Commons to deliver after his 9/11 contribution. The key passage is worth quoting in full:
“It is: because the deputy prime minister is in favour an elected House, is sponsoring the debate and will sponsor the Bill, it must be a bad idea. That view has many supporters in both main parties, as we will discover, and one can see the force of the point. When the right hon. gentleman said before the election that he wanted to unite the nation, he could scarcely have imagined that people of all shades of opinion would come together so quickly to agree that he is not a very lovable rogue. However, although that is a tempting argument, I hope that my colleagues, especially Labour colleagues, will not fall for it. The right hon. Gentleman needs no help from either of the two so-called main parties to administer his fate, and there is a much bigger game here than the temptation to kick a man when he is down. The roadblock to reform is not, in this case, the right hon. Gentleman, but the Government’s puppetmaster, the Prime Minister. We should not be diverted by the temptation of kicking smaller fry.”
Cameron’s a “puppetmaster” and Clegg deserves a “kicking”. This is a bit of a departure from his contributions since losing the leadership contest last autumn, which have mainly been limited to foreign affairs and health.
Perhaps this last David Miliband, newly re-engaged in the hurly-burly of domestic politics, gives us a glimpse of what we might see if he were to return to the Labour frontbench. But all these different styles, all employed in the space of one day, suggests to me that he’s not quite sure which direction he’s going to take. Graceful retirement to academia? Challenge again for the leadership? Become a foreign policy specialist?
Who knows. All I know, is that keeping up with all these David Milibands is going to be a tough job for the likes of me.
Comments
Be the first to comment on this article!