I don't normally pay much attention - the sheer cynicism of these brief, controlled appearances appal me. But I did go along to Ed Miliband's 2011 appearance at the university, a few months after he'd become Labour leader. I'm a Labour member, joining in 2007 in the hope of getting John McDonnell elected leader, which tells you quite enough about my politics. Despite my disappointment, I liked Ed Miliband despite his Oxford PPE ways, and voted for him. While he was unlikely to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and has a lot of very unimpressive allies on the right of the Labour Party, I thought he was deeply-immersed in socialist culture and had a lot of bright ideas derived from radical American community organisers, and he'd been a very impressive Environment Secretary. His brother David, by contrast, seemed extruded ready-made from the establishment machine, and was an apologist for the worst excesses of the 'war on terror'.
So anyway, along came Ed to an unfashionable ex-polytechnic in an unfashionable city, and he was relaxed, witty, open, thoughtful, quite self-deprecating and very generous with his time. He seems like someone comfortable in his own skin, reflective, open-minded and capable of radical thought. I knew immediately, that the British press would destroy him.
Nobody gets that high up in Labour or any other political party without being far less nice than they seem, but Miliband's nerdish intellectualism and slightly gauche manner were exactly the kind of things the rightwing press would revel in. And so it came to pass: the disgusting attacks on his dead father were only shocking if you'd never seen the Daily Mail in action, while Bacon Sandwichgate was precisely the kind of petty spitefulness the tabloid press is so expert at. I also thought there was a hint of anti-semitism in it too, given Miliband's non-practising Jewishness.
Looked at from one perspective, Miliband is an identikit New Labour politician: privileged, white, male, elite education, middle-class and a Londoner – someone wavering middle-ground voters could trust not to have the Queen hung from the nearest lamp-post to Buckingham Palace. Much like Jeremy Corbyn, however (you won't often see that sentence), Miliband's threat to the political and social establishment was that he wanted to do politics differently: less of the ritualised point-scoring, Thick of It–style tribalism, spinning and viciousness (not that these things ever entirely went away). The problem with that is that if the others won't go along with it, or you're not very good at these things, you're dead meat. Perhaps the treatment Miliband came in for demonstrated the genuine threat he posed to the right. Certainly his leadership of the party was heavy on principle but never managed to carve out a clear message that the electorate could latch on to. It kept coming up with interesting, often radical ideas such as 'predistribution' but never in ways that it could communicate well. Too often good ideas were stifled in triangulation or message management that meant they dribbled away to nothingness: the dynamic Miliband I suspected was in there somewhere seemed to be trapped in excessive caution. Eventually he lost to Conservatives who had absolutely nothing to say, but an excess of confidence in their own abilities, helped by a conservative press that ensured Miliband's alleged snack-based incompetence outweighed actual, y'know, policies. I'm still sad about that - despite my reservations on a number of things, an Ed Miliband administration would have done good things on the environment, Europe, poverty, inequality and a host of other issues that have since become disasters.
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