Populist politics are creating a generational crisis in compassion, says the Labour leader-that-never-was, now head of a global refugee charity
Political life is full of “sliding doors” moments, but few what-ifs are as resonant as David Miliband’s. A little more than a decade ago, for a report in the Observer, I went out on the road with him and his brother – up to Gateshead and Glasgow – as they campaigned against each other for the Labour leadership. If you’d have asked me at the end of that fortnight who would be prime minister in March 2021, I’d have given you short odds that Miliband, D, would just be entering his second term. That alternative history would have avoided not only bacon-sarnie etiquette and the Ed Stone, but also Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit. Historians will no doubt come to argue that the first decades of the 21st century in Britain were shaped by the EU referendum, but they might also pay close attention to that previous 51-49 contest when, having won every round of the election, with big majorities among Labour MPs and members, David – long the opposition politician most feared by David Cameron’s Tories – was squeezed out at the last by the affiliate votes of Len McCluskey’s Unite union, intent on revenge against Blairites.
In person, Miliband, whip thin, hardly greying, has changed not much at all in that decade – on the surface at least. Grinning on my laptop screen from New York, where he has been based for the past seven years as CEO of the International Rescue Committee, the global refugee charity, he maintains the same geeky charisma – Alastair Campbell used to call him “Brains” as much for the Thunderbirds puppet as his intellect – that made him foreign secretary and Gordon Brown’s heir apparent at 42. Three years younger than Keir Starmer, the eternal centrist “king across the water” has the grown-up policy focus of the Labour leader, with an edge more wattage and wit.
