It’s no time for the Opposition to lose its Ed

Please God, make Gordon Brown go away. Next week. Tomorrow. Now.

Yesterday.

Please God, let it not be another Blairite snake-charmer, fixated on opinion polls and believing in nothing but vote-chasing: the shysters who poisoned Labour’s soul. Not Alan Milburn, please God.

Please God, let it not be some stale warhorse, survivor from Blair to Brown, veteran of the Today programme and holder of the great offices.

They had their moment and missed it: not Jack Straw, please God; not Alan Johnson.

Please God, let it not be one of those apparatchiks that organisations generate: some calculating maestro of colourless prose, clawing mechanically to the top but unable to fly. Please, not David Miliband.

Please God, let it not be some maverick from the party’s Left — some Jon Cruddas or Diane Abbott — who’ll bewitch their party in a moment of madness, then lead it into never-never land.

Please God, let it not be some populist deficit-denier like Ed Balls, who’ll tickle the trade unions’ tummies and terrify the middle classes.

Well, God obliged. Sent instead has been an intelligent man, with experience but largely untainted by the errors of the previous administration. Not notably slick, with nothing of the Blairite pleaser about him, he appears to be slightly left of centre, but no Marxist madcap. He enjoys the friendly relationship with the unions that his union-dependent party dare not jettison, but is in no sense a scion of organised labour.

Nobody, not even his enemies, would call Ed Miliband unprincipled or corrupt. Nobody would call him stupid. Nobody would call him lazy.

Nobody would call him a zealot or any kind of an ideologue. Mr Miliband comes across in public as a natural, commonsense sort of chap, good-natured, and not given to the sweaty, shouty and posturing swagger that voters so hate in our politics. And he’s clean-cut and nice-looking.

Yet a numerically formidable but ideologically tangled phalanx of critics seems to be gunning for the new Labour leader. Who are they?

The Tories, first, obviously. It’s their job. Yet I’m not sure that David Cameron’s rather aggressive put-downs at Prime Minister’s Questions appear to the wider audience outside the chamber to be entirely fair or proportionate — or, for that matter, likeable. Windiness does invite a sharp kick; Margaret Thatcher delivered these to Neil Kinnock with effect. But Mr Miliband is developing an often effective dispatch-box line in cool, laconic, patient perplexity, and doing at least as well at PMQs as Mr Cameron’s Boy David did against a much weaker Goliath, Gordon Brown.

The Labour leader deserves credit for his dispatch-box success, for it can’t be said that he starts from a strong position.

Second, Labour’s Centre Left: Mr Miliband’s more insidious potential enemy. It was they and the unions who won it for him, and some among them are now shifting their feet uneasily at the relative blandness of their man’s stance, and casting admiring glances in the direction of the Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls. See Dan Hodges’s blog in the New Statesman (http://tinyurl.com/4xcxtvg) — “We know Ed’s in charge; we just don’t know which one” — evidence, if not of a plot, then of a gathering story.

To those in the Labour Party tempted by the saleability of Mr Balls’s pursuit of a simple anti-cuts agenda as the flag in which the Opposition should wrap itself, may I offer a cautionary note? If by 2015 this Government’s economic policy has palpably failed, Labour is going to win regardless — unless, that is, its leader hugely irritates voters.

If, on the other hand, coalition economics seem by then to be proving their case (or even if “not proven” remains the verdict), then an opposition that had bet the farm on British economic failure would be badly exposed. Currently I sense among many voters a strong if unfocused disinclination to hear the perfectly arguable Ballsite case against sharp spending cuts, believing instead that any government would have to do something draconian about debt. When there’s an attractive argument that the public are in no mood to hear, tread carefully with it. Ed Miliband is (the occasional sub-Mandela rant notwithstanding) treading carefully.

That’s wise.

The third strand in the anti-Ed Miliband brigade is composed of disappointed, sometimes Blairite, supporters of David Miliband. They are angry. They would enjoy Ed Miliband’s fall. Often unvoiced among their criticisms are two gripes. One is his treatment of his brother. The other is his junior but stalwart membership of Gordon Brown’s former gang.

But I’m unaware of any rule of primogeniture in British politics. The older brother has no God-given right to any prize, and in this case the older brother had his chance earlier, and declined it. No less than any other kind of junior, a younger sibling is entitled to think himself more capable than his senior, and go for the job. People now saying “of course, it should have been David” might well have been saying (had it been David) “of course we always thought he’d be a bit of a disappointment”.

No, there’s only one really bad thing I know about Ed Miliband, and that is that for some years he was an enthusiastic member of a gang led by a seriously catastrophic man. Either Ed could not see Gordon’s incapacity for high office — in which case his powers of observation must be wanting — or else he knowingly backed a very nasty shower.

I trust it’s the latter. We can only excuse him by reflecting that many successful leaders have made their way first as fleas on the backs of some pretty gruesome dogs. They tell themselves that as this is the available dog, then so be it; one day they will be themselves, make their own plans.

But how much time the Labour Party will give Ed Miliband to do so is becoming a troubling question.

To those in the party whose nostrils pick up the scent of an early challenge to his leadership, all I can say is that this is a decent, measured, thoughtful and mercifully unirritating man, who is unlikely to do anything really stupid. He will carry you carefully through an unavoidably bloody couple of years. So be careful what you wish for.