Ed Miliband scores the cover interview for this week’s New Statesman. He finally joins the ever-growing list of Labour MPs who have, by pure coincidence, decided now is the time for a puff piece in which they pontificate about Labour’s problems, speak wistfully about their childhoods, and pose for weird pictures. If you want a job in the real world, you usually submit a CV. In Labour, you give a War and Peace-length interview to the New Statesman…
Miliband is careful not to mention his personal ambitions specifically. Luckily the New Statesman does it for him:
“Some of those who know Miliband are clear he has his eyes on becoming chancellor. Nigel Farage has told friends privately in recent weeks that he expects Miliband to become prime minister by 2027.”
Oh no, don’t put that in there…
He does at least admit he wants to smash the ming vase to pieces:
“We won on a modest, relatively safe platform,” Miliband went on. “That’s not meant as a criticism. It’s just a description of the facts.” Miliband mounts a defence of the government. Good things are happening, he promises.”
Most notable, however:
“Should Andy Burnham or Angela Rayner become the leader of Labour this year, they will not deviate from the script that Miliband has written.”
In other words: don’t forget who’s really running the show. He is even described as having “liquid charm“. The only line he might take issue with is his “remarkably enormous oblong of a head”…
Jeremy Corbyn has presented his vision of an “independent” foreign policy in the New Statesman today. Apart from complaining about Maduro’s arrest, he suggests about two actual elements of said foreign policy:
“In 2024-25, the UK spent more than £60bn – or around 2.5 per cent of GDP – on “defence”. Starmer has pledged to increase this to a staggering 5 per cent by 2035. Imagine if we spent as much time talking about climate alliances – and how to empower them – as we do about military alliances. Imagine if the money we spent on killing people overseas was spent protecting the planet that we all depend for survival.”
Apart from that Corbyn – who recently founded a now-dead party – suggests abolishing the veto of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and instituting an “expanded, rolling membership on it.” A vision which manages to be entirely vague and clearly disastrous at the same time…
Ed Miliband wrapped up his speech at the New Statesman Christmas party last night with his best attempt at lifting the spirits of the Labour faithful in attendance:
“Polls are not a forecast, they are a snapshot… if polls were a forecast, I would be currently celebrating my tenth year as Prime Minister. For those of you paying attention, that didn’t happen. I was 15 points ahead of David Cameron… I say this to the Labour people in the room: fatalism, pessimism, never lifted a single child out of poverty, never created a single job, never won a single vote for the Labour Party. We are 18 months into a government. I think Reform are incredibly vulnerable and totally beatable…”
He never quite got over that 2015 drubbing, did he…
Andrew Marr has conceded he might have over-egged the pudding when he claimed, just a day after last year’s election, that Labour’s victory would turn Britain into a “little haven of peace and stability“. Remember when a “wall of money” was supposed to pour into this country? Is this wall of money in the room with us now?
He writes in this week’s New Statesman:
“After Keir Starmer’s victory, I succumbed to that hard-to-forgive journalistic sin: the faint prickle of optimism. With a big majority, it seemed that, perhaps at last, the “grown-ups” were in charge… But shocks kept coming. Above all, the Labour establishment had underestimated the deeper difficulties of so much it was facing. The intractable problem of ballooning welfare spending and worklessness; the sheer incompetence of much of the state; the pressures on housing and public services caused by the post-Brexit immigration wave. It did not feel as if a new government meant a new start, not in daily life.”
Guido will at least give Marr credit for admitting he got it catastrophically wrong on The Quiet Era of politics. Remedial support is available for other recovering Starmtroopers. Take note Otto English, Anna Soubry, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Marina Purkiss, James O’Brien…
On Tuesday last week the New Statesman launched ‘The Hitch’, its new Guido-style digital gossip column styled after Christopher Hitchens. Gone now…
Six days later the big brand launch has been quietly shelved. The column has been quietly renamed the Pygge, after the pseudonymous Edward Pygge character used by numerous writers and critics…
The stealth rebrand may have something to do with the poor reaction to Hitchens’ portrayal, not least from this brother, who responded to claims that ‘the family’ gave its approval to the column:
“Well, you didn’t ask me, or if you did you must have used smoke signals or semaphore. I am quite easy to find. I have slight misgivings, for obvious reasons, about the decision to portray him while smoking.”
Unfortunately the URL is still the same. How not to do a digital launch. Exclusive non-renamed gossip and revelations are available to co-conspirators in Guido’s weekly Westminster Whispers newsletter…
UPDATE: Guido hears the family did give its permission initially, then withdrew it later.
The New Statesman has today launched a new gossip column on its website. Who needs print sales anyway?
The Labour house rag is promoting “The Hitch,” styled after its former assistant and foreign editor Christopher Hitchens, as its new fast-paced online tittle-tattle and news merchant. Guido was founded over 21 years ago by the way…
Political magazines have been pursuing online subscription growth at the expense of print for some time. The diary-style operation has repurposed an old X account to use. The illusion is somewhat punctured by the fact it doesn’t have its own email address…
The best breaking news and exclusive gossip can of course be found on these pixels. Even more revelations are available to co-conspirators in Guido’s weekly Westminster Whispers newsletter…
Former leader of the SNP in Westminster Ian Blackford told Times Radio why he believes Nicola Sturgeon’s claim that she spent no time in the kitchen and therefore didn’t see any of her husband’s purchases:
“She doesn’t have a passion for cooking.”