Not this again – when will someone complain about David’s cruel attempt to “shaft” Ed?

Yesterday while talking about his and his brother Jo’s ambitions, Boris Johnson became the ceremonial 1,000^th Tory to play the “he shafted his brother” card against Ed Miliband. Let’s leave aside the fact that this reportedly contradicts a Downing Street diktat to stop playing the card, since despite its intended negative connotations it contradicts the Tories’ “weak weak weak” line of attack. As the frequently spot-on New Labour stalwart Tom Harris MP put it in The Telegraph recently, “Ed Miliband is a bastard – and that's a good thing”. Let’s also leave aside the fact that in Boris’ case, he even went the extra mile by invoking Godwin’s Law in a manner that effectively inverted Vice Cable’s old jibe against Gordon Brown – he tagged Ed as “Stalin”, rather than as the Mr Bean (or Neil Kinnock, more precisely) Cameron would prefer people to think of him as.

Let’s even leave aside the fact that YouGov told us over 18 months ago that 58% agreed "There was nothing wrong with Ed Miliband standing against his brother and seeing who won" - only 17% disagreed. I’d also stress that that came from a sample of respondents who were more likely than not to have thought David would’ve done a better job - not exactly raving Ed partisans (interestingly however, only 26% felt Ed was “too close to the Trade Unions” and even among Conservative voters barely just half firmly agreed, perhaps calling into question another common Tory attack line). In other words, the press and we inhabitants of the political bubble might love the whole ‘Cain & Abel/Miliband of Brothers’ saga, but the public really couldn’t care less.

No, what I want to focus on is why no one ever calls out David Miliband for his cruel attempt to shaft his brother. In 2008 Ed Miliband gave a great speech at conference – striding around the stage and speaking fluently without notes, setting the hearts of the Labour grassroots aflutter just as his supposedly more astute older brother harpooned himself with that bizarre picture with a banana. That same elder brother and his allies then spent 18 months repeatedly stepping up to the plate to challenge the doomed-to-lose Brown, only for David to remember he’d misplaced his spine each and every time. 

All the while, speculation about Miliband the Younger’s own leadership prospects grew in the party ranks – he even grabbed fresh new prominence for himself, coordinating the 2010 party manifesto and fighting for the inclusion of popular ideas like the living wage within it. The heightened political celebrity of both brothers even began to vaguely permeate pop-culture – in a 2009 episode of Peep Show, David Mitchell pondered whether a third “unborn Miliband” might be PM by the time he paid off the bills on his new couch. But then, after the May 2010 election, David coldly betrayed his brother – in a ruthless bid to extinguish his only brother’s rising star, he slyly announced his leadership ambitions first. Good job Ed beat the back-stabbing scoundrel anyway, right?

Most will dismiss the narrative I’ve just laid out as ridiculous – of course a smart and respected former Foreign Secretary with a huge following in his party had a right to stand, they might object. They’d do so entirely rightfully of course, hence why I’d agree with them.

It’s just that the more commonly accepted reverse of this logic is just as preposterous. What the 58% of the public in that YouGov poll clearly understood, and what the commentariat, the Tories and ‘betrayed’ Mili-D fans somehow miss, is that it was an open internal election with no incumbent in a democratic party in a democratic nation. Anyone who had a following in the party or who wanted to apply could step up – Ed Miliband, David Miliband, even the loony likes of Diane Abbott. David may have been a few years senior and the presumed frontrunner, but in the Labour Party we don’t do coronations – hence the rightful outrage over Falkirk – and if Labour learnt anything from 1994 and 2007, it’s that the short-run convenience of stitching up leadership elections only leads to festering hostilities that eat the party alive in the long term. 

Nor is disliking the electoral system Labour uses for leadership much of a basis for questioning the legitimacy of Ed’s victory. David was an AV supporter and runoff voting in leadership elections is essential for party unity, hence why even the Tories won’t use pure FPTP for them, while the overall structure of the electoral college – where just one MP/MEP’s vote is worth that of 600 party members and over 12,000 unionists/affiliate members – should have favoured an ‘establishment candidate’ with greater seniority and presumed general election appeal (David) over someone whose campaign was organisationally reliant on turning out the heavily underweighted affiliate vote (Ed). And as I noted above, voters may not even care about the ‘it was McClusky wot won it’ gripe, if YouGov’s December 2011 numbers are still right.

I’m not surprised Boris Johnson doesn’t get the unsubtle difference between contests and coronations, of course. Eton, then Oxford. MP for Henley, where a pebble could get elected to public office if it wore a blue rosette, before parachuting himself into London to face only minor opponents for the Conservative mayoral nod – London Assembly Member Richard Barnes even graciously withdrew and endorsed Boris, allowing him to waltz to a 75% victory. In the election, he faced Ken Livingstone, a tired-out barely-reformed hard-leftist with intimate ties to Hugo Chavez and Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and did so at a time when Labour in general was unpopular. And thanks to poor decision-making by the London Labour selectorate, he had the good fortune of facing an even more clapped-out Ken in 2012, who trailed his party brand and proceeded to add both tax-dodging and a firmer charge of anti-Semitism to his already-long list of personal negatives.

So it doesn't surprise me that BoJo and Ed’s other critics don’t recognise the gaping difference between entitlement and fair-fight competition. But that doesn’t mean all the rest of us should fail to do so as well.