1 - Ideology: stuck between utopia and the Dog and Duck

Summary

Introduction

“Bloody hell, not another Tony-Gordon scenario,” Alastair Campbell said to David Miliband (Campbell 2018b: 567), “and even worse because you’re brothers!” It was December 2009, and the New Labour years had reached their final months. Gordon Brown, then prime minister, was struggling with diminished political authority, having experienced cabinet resignations, dire poll ratings and relentless negative media. Thoughts were inevitably turning to what would happen next. While the Conservative leader, David Cameron, was not seen as running away with the forthcoming 2010 election, Labour MPs did not have high expectations for their party's performance. So, who would lead Labour after Brown? The name “Miliband” was typically the answer to that question, but increasingly people wondered, which one, David or Ed? David and Ed Miliband were both cabinet ministers in 2009, although with different political identities viewed through the prism of the leading figures of New Labour: Blair and Brown. What Campbell feared – having just heard from David Miliband that his brother was not convinced he should be the next Labour leader – was that the “TB-GBs” (the nickname given to the Blair–Brown feud in office) would be replicated with the Milibands (ibid.).

Ed and David did run against each other, along with Diane Abbott, Ed Balls and Andy Burnham, although it was very clearly, from day one, the “Miliband show”. Ed Miliband beat his brother by a tiny margin, and the “psychodrama” label often attached to Blair and Brown was duly resurrected. The result was seen as a “surprise”, yet five years later there was an even bigger one: the election of Jeremy Corbyn to succeed Miliband, who had been defeated in the 2015 election by Cameron's Conservatives, with the Tories winning a parliamentary majority against the odds. While the Miliband psychodrama became a distant memory, viewing Labour politics through the prism of New Labour did not. Blair himself became a more high-profile figure again, despairing at the Corbyn leadership and focusing on the Brexit debates that followed the 2016 referendum. The post-2010 years were tumultuous ones indeed. This chapter seeks to explain how successive Labour leaders sought to “get over” New Labour ideologically. There are two core arguments in what follows. The first is a point of similarity between the Miliband brothers and some of the leading lights of the Corbyn project, including John McDonnell, who would go on to be shadow chancellor after 2015.