Fishburn Hedges

28.09.2011

One of the primary principles of public relations is to ensure that your messaging stands up to tough scrutiny. If you are going to say that you are one of the top five companies in your industry, expect to be asked on what criterion. If you claim to have a unique technology, you should be prepared to justify that claim.

On that criterion, Ed Miliband’s pitch in his speech yesterday to benefit from “the heritage of the outsider” in Britain doesn’t stand up.

Yes, his parents were immigrants, but his father Ralph was a lecturer at the LSE then Professor of Politics at Leeds University. Ralph was also a member of the Independent Left Corresponding Society, which met on Sunday evenings at Tony Benn's house in Holland Park, and included the New Left Review editor, Perry Anderson; the economist Andrew Glyn; the socialist historian Robin Blackburn; Tariq Ali, and Labour MPs including Jeremy Corbyn. Ed’s father was a man embedded within the wider Labour movement, although often a staunch critic of it.

Ed went to the local comprehensive – Haverstock School, in Camden – but then to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and during a year out in 2002–2003, to Harvard.

Apart from a brief period as a TV journalist, Ed has worked almost entirely within the Labour Party and government. In his teens he was one of Tony Benn’s “Teabags”, helping around the MP’s office.

He entered HM Treasury with Gordon Brown on 2 May 1997, and has been at the heart of government since then. As Tony Benn commented in his diary for Sunday 10 December 2000: “We went to Marion Miliband’s for dinner with David and Edward . . . The boys live entirely in the world of the prime minister’s advisers.”

Ed secured the nomination for Doncaster North very easily, in 2005, quickly moving up to become Labour leader. He lives with his wife Justine, a barrister, in a £2m-plus house next to Hampstead Heath.

All this achievement is hugely admirable, but surely at some point it becomes impossible to lay claim to the heritage of the outsider, unless you define “inside” as a caricature – for example whether or not your grandfather rode to hounds before heading back to tea at the ancestral pile.

The Miliband family has long been firmly inside the wider Labour movement, and to any objective observer, Ed and his family are highly successful insiders within British society. To portray himself otherwise is hugely disingenuous and surely counterproductive with that vast majority of the electorate that lives outside the North London, intellectual world.

The fact that Miliband can call himself in any sense an outsider could be a lack of self-awareness, or a lack of connection to real people – or both. It smacks of inverse snobbery totally at odds with the spirit of New Labour. And from a comms perspective it is unsustainable positioning that won’t stand up to any scrutiny. He should stop.

Posted by Paul Farrow