The Waugh Room

Tuesday 27th September 2011 | 16:50

Meet Ed

There's a wonderful moment in the movie 'Meet Dave' where a crew of miniature aliens land on Earth in a spaceship that looks like a robotic Eddie Murphy.

The robot, manned from a control centre inside its head, at first finds it difficult to learn how humans talk and behave. Whenever anyone smiles at him, he smiles back by baring his teeth maniacally. When someone shakes his hand, he reciprocates by shaking theirs like a dervish.

And when he's asked if he lives locally, the Murphy robot replies: "Yes, of course, I am just a regular person from right here on Earth, just like you. I just don't get out that much."

Today in Liverpool, it wasn't so much Meet Dave as Meet Ed. And the first mission for the miniature aliens guiding the Labour leader onto the platform was to somehow shift his image as a goofy bloke who knifed his brother.

Now, the minions are smart and don't underestimate the 'personal' deficit Miliband has with the voters. But judging from the speech, they are quite a way from doing much about it. When the levers were pulled, his tongue and brain seemed to go off in the wrong direction.

There was some nice stuff about the birth of his son, getting married and telling stories to his son. The love for his wife was heartfelt. The choreography of his and Justine's exit was perfectly done (despite the feeling of him entering the Big Brother House).

Yet when it came to his own moment of self-definition, Miliband came out with the buttock-clenchingly awful line:

"This is who I am. The heritage of the outsider. The vantage point of the insider".

Eh? That must be the first time a political leader (on Earth at least) has defined himself with two nouns, one of them abstract.

The Eddie Murphy-speak was part of a wider problem of poor phrase-making. The speech veered from the bleedin' obvious ("I-am-inter-ested-in-the-Govern-ment-doing-the-right-thing-by-the-British-people") to the utterly banal ("we're not a country of bad people but great people..great people in a great country").

Whoever came up with the phrase "a new bargain for Britain" deserves sending back to their mother planet. A bargain is either a vague contractual concept or it is something cheap. Neither will get the punters blood pumping. Within seconds of him uttering the phrase, it conjured up images of a Bargain Britain, of a Poundland politics, of a BOGOF politician.

The real difficulty Miliband had was that in the deliberate absence of policy, he had to rely on making an argument and making it in an impassioned and well-crafted way. The burden on the rhetoric seemed too much too bear.

If Ed Balls' speech yesterday was the equivalent of an FT leader column, Miliband's was a kind of Prospect essay (or in parts a London Review of Books essay). Given the huge task he's set himself to 'redefine the centre', that's perhaps no surprise.

But when you have a politician who is far from a natural orator at the best of times, it makes it very difficult to deliver a soundbite to the 10 o'clock news about reconnecting with Britain (the broadcasters were tearing their hair out tonight trying to find a decent quote to lead with, always a bad sign).

Ed's advisers were briefing beforehand that this speech was a 'roll of the dice' and he should at least be credited for trying something new and bold. .

At his best today, he sounded forward-looking, a break with the past, someone who wants to "rip up the old rules so that the country works for you". The cleverest line was that David Cameron is "the last gasp of the old rules", while the most potent was the ridicule of the PM's claim that "we're all in it together".

I particularly liked the biting wit of the attack on Southern Cross, that "they may not have sold their own grandmothers for a fast buck, but they certainly sold yours".

The section that most effectively spoke directly to the squeezed middle was about "the people who don't make a fuss, who don't hack phones, loot shops, fiddle their expenses or earn telephone number salaries at the banks".

The speech was certainly ambitious in its scope. This was a critique of the way Britain has been governed "not just for a year or so, but for decades". "It is a crisis of the promises made over the past thirty years," he said. Miliband was disssing not just Thatcher and Major, but Blair, Brown and Cameron. In effect, he was attacking the way capitalism itself has operated since the 1980s.

A breathless Angela Eagle said afterwards that "we've got someone who's identified the fact that the Thatcher/Reagan consensus...is now over".

Unfortunately, therein lies the problem for Miliband. At times, he fell into precisely the trap that the Conservatives have been hoping he would: shifting the centre in a way that often sounds just like a lurch to the Left.

The most shocking moment today was when a chunk of the audience jeered the name of Tony Blair. Miliband looked startled but he had no one else to blame after declaring "I am not Tony Blair". He shares the responsibility tonight for TV clips of a Labour conference that looked like it was disowning the man who had won them three elections (and left office unbeaten at the ballot box). Worst of all it looked like an insult to the millions of voters who had voted for him. Miliband heaped more praise on people like Harriet Harman than either Blair or Brown. (His line about the Olympics had a glaring absence of any credit to Blair).

The newspapers are bound to seize too on Miliband's use of the word 'predators' to describe 'bad' capitalists. He could have made his case without using a word beloved of the Socialist Workers Party and others who see rapacious businessmen carving up the pie for themselves.

Clearly boosted by his boldness on the Murdoch affair, he was right to focus on vested interests. Yet there was nothing about challenging the unions on their vested interests. So much for a man who has learned what leadership really is.

The stuff on differentiating between good and bad businesses was vaguer than a sixth form politics essay, beyond stating that he would tax and regulate them differently.

The section on education was banal beyond belief. "To the universities not opening up, I say: open your eyes, open your doors".  His diktat that they should admit everyone who gets the grades sounded like the very worst of the Laura Spence/Gordon Brown row.

Overall, Team Miliband will be pleased they've at least made a start on their project to rip up the old rules (even though we don't know what the new ones will be).

Yet, to use his own favourite phrase, the Labour leader may have got more than he "bargained" for today

The key problem may well be that the voters have now read his lips, read his face, in short they've read Ed. And realised that he is indeed Red.