LEADER ARTICLES

I’m not a geek, but here’s something I have already learned in the short life of this blog. I should have guessed it before, since this rule applies to religion, law and the internet.

Politics is controlled by anoraks.

I rely on a small group of people to decode what’s being said in Westminster, and then translate it into plain English. Polly Toynbee, obviously, Steve Richards, Peter Riddell, Gary Younge, Peter Wilby and even occasionally Quentin Letts tend to do the job for me.

Before I learned what anyone else had to say, I had, like a naïve idiot, made up my own mind about the meaning of David Miliband’s Guardian article. All I knew about him before was that he was considered a Blairite, and that he’d been pushed by the Blairites to stand against Gordon last year. Even so his article was packed with several un-Blairish ideas:
1) He apologised for Iraq, the most senior Minister to do so as far as I am aware.
2) He spoke warmly about Europe, a refreshing change from more than a decade of Brown-Blair hectoring.
3) He implied he was less at ease with the filthy rich than any other senior Labour politician since 1997.
4) He went much further than Brown or Cameron ever have on the green agenda.
5) He defined a clear and positive way of fighting Cameron on poverty and social justice.
At no point did he back Gordon Brown – but then, at no point did he say he wanted to run a leadership contest against him.

Anyway, it seems I was totally mistaken. This article was the ultra-Blairite throwing down the gauntlet to the beleagured Brown (how would you like your cliches, Rawnsleyed or Borissed?). He’s directly challenging the party, it’s all a disaster… but it’s irrelevant anyway, because party rules will never allow a contest to happen. (In which case why make such a fuss about the article?)

And the reason, I’m told, that there will be no leadership contest, is because the party anoraks, the only people who truly understand the rules, will explain that Miliband won’t get the sufficent number of MPs or Trade Union votes to back him.

Which may well be true. And there may indeed be no need for a leadership contest. If Gordon genuinely does start to acknowledge that, for example, taxing the super-rich would be profitable and popular, and taxing the poor is not very, er, Labourish. If he promotes Miliband to Chancellor and starts to act as if he really does want to win the next election, maybe we can get away without one.

But if he fails, and enough people make a fuss, and the tide turns against him (oops, another Rawnsley), then the anoraks will find an interpretation of the rules that will allow the contest to go ahead.

Coming up: Maggie Thatcher, the great European…