It is striking that David Miliband is trying hard to play down his former closeness to Tony Blair, but no one holds his brother or Ed Balls's closeness to Gordon Brown against them.
This suggests two things.
The first is that Blair has become the new Harold Wilson: someone who won multiple general elections for Labour but has now been written out of Labour's history.
The second is that Labour clearly has little idea of what it has to do to regain an appeal to the wider electorate.
5 comments:
Not sure about the comparison really. Wilson really did play fast and loose with the different factions. Blair seems to have been fairly consistent ideologically, even if that ideology was and continues to be rather frightening. As to your second conclusion, I'm not sure that this isn't a result of the political "theatre" of the leadership campaign. This is being conducted for a specific audience: the Labour Party faithful. After that is concluded, then Labour will position itself in the centre ground, but on most of the territory the LibDems carved out in recent years. This will prove attractive to the left wing of the LibDems electorate, who will feel let down by the Coalition.
Blair will be doing very well if he gets as good and sympathetic a biographer as Ben Pimlott was for Wilson.
At least Harold Wilson was a Socialist.
and kept Britain out of the Vietnam war.
...and his wife was a poet, not a lawyer.
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