FirEd?

Ed Miliband did what the professional speechwriters always say you should do. He presented an argument, rather than a laundry list. He did not dole out random policy nuggets, with a bit on foreign policy thrown in, in order to touch every base. Instead he made a case, arguing that the values cherished by British society are not reflected in the ethics that underpin our economy.

He even framed that idea in a pithy way, pitching "producers" against "predators", insisting that too often we reward the latter over the former. The speech deserved credit, too, for trying to rise to the moment of current crisis, advocating not mere tinkering at the edges but a recasting of our entire economic model. And yet I worry it will do precisely nothing to improve the prospects of either Miliband or Labour.

That's not because I want more detail on how his ideas will translate into action or how, exactly, governments will distinguish predators from producers. Nor is mine the familiar concern that no one listens to conference speeches any more. The anxiety I have is both more superficial and deeper than that – and it is a worry that goes beyond Labour, touching on the state of politics itself.

Put simply, my fear is that you can make all the speeches and policy statements you like – carefully devising a strategy on this and crafting a narrative on that – but what matters more are shallow considerations of looks, demeanour, speech patterns and biography. That, in short, it is personality, not policy, that counts.

How else to explain today's Comres poll, which had the Conservatives one point ahead of Labour. This despite rising unemployment, an enfeebled economy and a series of cock-ups and U-turns that should have the Tories gasping for air. Some of that can be explained by the Conservatives' success in persuading voters that they are stoically engaged in the hard work of clearing up a mess not of their making. But polls show that the Tories' numbers are boosted by the voters' high regard for David Cameron, while Labour's are dragged down by their lukewarm view of Ed Miliband. Comres found just 24% regard Miliband as a credible prime minister-in-waiting – compared to 57% who do not.

There was similarly depressing reading to be found in a voluminous survey commissioned, admittedly, by the former Tory party treasurer Lord Ashcroft, but whose reliability has not been doubted. He found a Cameron premium, with the PM more popular than his party, as well as a Miliband deficit, with more than one in three voters less favourable to Miliband than they are to Labour. The words focus groups used to describe Cameron were "determined", "competent" and "ruthless" – while the one volunteered for Miliband was "weird".

Was he deemed weird because of his stance on the 50p tax rate or on climate change? No. Those surveyed cited his fighting his brother for the leadership (which they called "creepy"), his failure to get married until recently, and his way of speaking ("geeky").

Politicians and those around them – including those of us who spill gallons of ink each week discussing the smallest policy shifts, trying to calculate their impact on the electorate's preferences – recoil from contemplating the implications of all this. It pains them – us – to think elections could be settled by matters so trivial. I remember long conversations with the Gordon Brown camp, in which they would speak of dividing lines and the like, confident that a clever strategic move on, say, the economy could transform his fortunes – when the unpalatable truth was that voters had simply taken a long, hard look at him and decided that they did not want him as their prime minister. The same fate dispatched William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard.

Something similar is afoot in London, where Labour is currently 20 points ahead of the Tories – and where, despite that, Ken Livingstone is trailing far behind Boris Johnson. Why? According to YouGov's Peter Kellner: "It's an instinctive judgment, it's about character." Boris has out-Kenned Ken, stealing his predecessor's clothes as the cheeky, rebel politician. "Ken reinvented himself as a personality politician and he's now up against someone who does personality politics better than him," says Kellner.

It's not always been this way. Clement Attlee could be elected without having the obvious leadership look we'd identify today. Nor would Edward Heath, or even Harold Wilson, meet the modern definition of charisma. John Major was famously grey, yet he won in 1992 – but that was partly because he was up against Neil Kinnock, against whom many voters took a strong dislike. Ed Miliband's problem is that he is competing in Cameron against a man who has long looked the part, who even in a 10-second appearance on television has that mysterious, chemical quality that suggests a leader. Whatever that is, Miliband does not have it – yet.

Many will bristle at this kind of talk, insisting that such things should not matter, that, as Tony Benn always used to say, it's the issues that count. But Benn – no slouch as a personality politician himself – was always hopelessly idealistic on that score. Personalities do count. As I've written before, quoting an old teacher of mine: people don't believe in ideas, they believe in people who believe in ideas.

So this is the problem for Ed Miliband. He is a decent, clever man but he does not look the part. He looks too young; he looks more like the speechwriter than the speechgiver, an adviser to the leader rather than the leader. That could change; he might grow into the role over the next three-and-a-half years. One aide suggests that Miliband has challenged every other bit of conventional political wisdom – running against his brother, being unmarried, taking on Rupert Murdoch – and that maybe he will defy this one too.

"He's not an identikit politician," that aide admits, seeing strength in that fact. At this moment when everything is in flux and when the Labour leader is seeking to break a 30-year consensus on the economy, perhaps it is right to think that the old, admittedly shallow rules on what a prime minister must look like are ready to be broken too.

But it has unfortunate echoes of the Brownite refrain circa 2007, that people were ready for a non-celebrity leader for more sober times. It sounds principled, it sounds laudable. But right now the Tories are much safer than they should be, insulated by a leader with charisma and a touch of the X-factor. Labour desperately needs some of that too.

Michael Foot (RIP)

Jyoti Basu (RIP)

Jyoti Basu was a stumbling specialist of the half-finished sentence, a sometimes terrible public speaker who in his heyday attracted audiences of a million and more. He was awkward socially and fiercely private, a man given to slipping quietly away from the poverty of West Bengal for a month to imbibe London culture and occasionally a small brandy at the India Club.

He was never one of the poor millions who adored him. He was not really even a proper communist. But he was a revolutionary, and it is a measure of his impact on the lives of millions of landless West Bengal peasants that thousands thronged outside the Calcutta hospital where he lay dying to pay homage. He had seized land from the rich and turned many of the masses into subsistence farmers, and for this he was the unrivalled hero of leftist politics.

Not that his revolution ended poverty in West Bengal and its capital, Calcutta. Indeed, it arguably entrenched it. Business talent and big money fled, and Calcutta became an international icon for a particularly virulent kind of poverty that persists today amid familiar left-wing infighting.

Basu, invariably dressed in crisp white cotton, was rarely photographed wearing a smile. He came across as stern and distant, and the line between public and private life was strictly observed. His first wife died within 16 months of their marriage, and the second produced a son.

Basu’s politics and powerbase remained rooted in West Bengal, but he did have one chance at leaping out of this provincially feverish world in the mid-1990s to become India’s Prime Minister as head of a coalition government. The coalition might, had it succeeded, have stalled the rise of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, a party despised by most Muslims and blamed for much communal tension. But his party blocked him, effectively arguing that he would have to compromise Marxist ideals to accommodate so many shades of political opinion. He was furious and disappointed, and later described it as a blunder. He returned quietly to state politics while using his heightened prestige to become kingmaker of the rulers of Delhi. He influence was decisive in forming an alliance in 2004 between left-wingers and the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of Basu’s tenure was his intolerance and abhorrence of communalism. Calcutta and West Bengal rarely followed the rest of the country into outbreaks of religious rioting. Had Basu been a different person he could have set Bengal ablaze for short-term political gain, as other politicians routinely did elsewhere. Not that he was a benevolent ruler; the state apparatus of West Bengal had its ruthless and dictatorial side and its nightmarish bureaucracy.

His instinctive communal tolerance stemmed from a liberal upbringing in what is now Bangladesh as the son of a prosperous doctor, who sent him to the best schools and later at Presidency College, Calcutta, from which he graduated with honours in English. In 1935 he sailed to London to study law at Middle Temple.

His father was horrified when his son declared that he intended to pursue politics when he returned home, and, to boot, that he was now a communist. He had been inspired, in part, by the communist philosopher and writer Rajani Palme Dutt, and had dabbled in the Communist Party of Great Britain. After returning to Calcutta in 1940 he enrolled as a barrister at the Calcutta High Court but never practised.

Instead he joined the trade union movement and organised railway workers in Bengal and Assam. He became secretary of Friends of the Soviet Union and the Anti-Fascist Writers’ Association, and was in charge of maintaining contact with underground party workers. He was now, by any measure, a fully paid-up left-wing agitator.

His loathing of communalism was first manifest in 1946-47, when he played a crucial calming role as strikes and Hindu-

Muslim bloodletting threatened to engulf the state. He also ensured there was no anti-Sikh rioting in West Bengal after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister, in 1984 by her Sikh bodyguards.

In 1964 the communist movement in India split between ideological camps that variously supported India or China over the Sino-Indian war of 1962. Basu sided with the pro-China camp and became a founder and leader of the new Communist Party (Marxist) in West Bengal. Of the nine founding members of the politburo, Basu was the last survivor.

The party gained ground quickly but was trounced in state elections in 1972, which the Congress Party probably rigged, but won decisively in 1977 — the start of Basu’s 23 unbroken years of power, the longest stint as chief minister in Indian political history. He immediately confronted feudalism, spread land and wealth among the peasantry, and was from that moment the invincible man of the poor.

The stifling state mechanisms that he established reinforced his power, ensuring that big business stayed away and which can still make entrepreneurs think twice about setting up in West Bengal. He made one blunder that he later admitted to: early in his chief ministership he banned the teaching of English in primary schools, sowing the seeds for greater isolation from the rest of India and hindering his later attempts to attract US investors.

Basu remained politically active until he retired in 2000 because of ill health, but as India’s leading elder statesman he never stopped receiving high-powered visitors at his home. His politics remained as they had always been, Marxist in name but Fabian in nature and, after the introduction of economic liberalism in India in the 1980s, latterly capitalist in fact.

Basu’s wife died in 2003. He is survived by his son.

The Party & The Paper

A devastating Editorial by The Guardian about Gordon Brown...

There are lots of unwritten rules in UK politics. Just to mention two:

- You don´t become PM without the support of The Sun.
- You don´t become Labour leader without the support of The Guardian.

Gordon Brown: Labour's dilemma

Gordon Brown talks much about his Presbyterian past, but he has a story to tell - about personal morality, a sense of justice and a belief in the power of politics that does, at its best, appeal to the "better angels of our nature", as he put it on his first day in Downing Street. The nation needs someone who answers this description to lead it now, just as Labour needs to find someone who is able to set out a case for progressive government. Political reform can no longer be put aside as an abstract idea, of appeal to dreamers but not to voters who face the harder realities of life. The public is calling furiously for a better system. People want an honest parliament. They want leaders who are prepared to act. They loathe the old system, and many of the people who are part of it.

Tragedy

The tragedy for Mr Brown and his party is that his chance to change it has gone. Although he still purports to be a radical, he has adopted the caution of an establishment man. He cannot lead a revolution against his own way of doing government, and yet a revolution is necessary. Grandstanding on his claims to good intentions, the prime minister demands the right to carry on, even as the cabinet implodes around him. The home secretary, the chancellor, and perhaps even the foreign secretary may go, and Labour faces its worst defeat in its history on Thursday, but the prime minister does not recognise his direct responsibility for the mayhem.

The truth is that there is no vision from him, no plan, no argument for the future and no support. The public see it. His party sees it. The cabinet must see it too, although they are not yet bold enough to say so. The prime minister demands loyalty, but that has become too much to ask of a party, and a country, that was never given the chance to vote for him. Had there been a contest for the leadership in 2007 - and had Mr Brown called a general election - he would probably have won. He decided not to do these things. And he has largely failed since.

Any assessment must recognise the strength of Mr Brown's response to the financial implosion. When action to save the banks was needed, he acted impressively. But flaws in his character that drove his party close to revolt last summer now dominate again. He is not obviously able to lead. He blames others for failures and allows them insufficient credit for successes, as the current dismembering of Alistair Darling's reputation shows. He is only secure in the economic comfort zone he built up as chancellor, and in the company of his closest allies, such as Ed Balls, now being tipped as chancellor. The prime minister shines at the IMF or the G20, but the job involves much more than that.

Great causes win the day when people fight for them. A year of lingering emptiness beckons instead. Parliament is treading water; little is happening beyond the discredited attempt to sell off part of Royal Mail. Parts of government still function: on climate change, for instance, Britain is leading the way towards Copenhagen. But Mr Brown himself is not inspiring progress on these things. The McBride affair was poisonous to his reputation, but he did not seem to understand why. His timidity in the face of the expenses crisis has been painful.

The blunt reality is that, even if he set out a grand programme of reform now, his association with it would doom its prospects. Proportional representation would transform parliament, but if Mr Brown put a referendum on the ballot, it would be defeated because he backed it. A draft constitutional renewal bill was published more than 12 months ago - but what has come of it? This week Mr Brown announced a national democratic council that might (to see it in a generous light) form the basis of the sort of constitutional convention that led to Scotland's modern parliament. But it is too late. The chance for him has passed.

The next seven days will be crucial to Britain's political future. Jacqui Smith's pre-emptive resignation yesterday was the start of a reshuffle that Mr Brown may be imagining will defend himself from terrible election results. He is heading for the bunker. If Labour holds off now, at perhaps the last moment when a change of leader might be possible, it had better reconcile itself to sticking with its leader to the bitter end. The worst of all worlds would be for people to drag their feet, carry on supporting him when others desert, then desert too, late in the day, when it can only make things worse. During the next few days it will become apparent whether Mr Brown still commands sufficient support among his parliamentary colleagues to carry on. If he suspects not, he would win much respect by announcing that he will be standing down, and let his party choose someone who can use its remaining time in power to reform parliament and then fight the election with credibility.

The case for a new leader has been made stronger by the expenses crisis. Labour needs to enter the next election having reformed parliament. But Mr Brown will never do it. The prime minister was absent from the start of the debate and cautious now he has joined it. His instinct is usually to hesitate, and to establish reviews and commissions. Meanwhile, the chance of a generation is being missed. Only a Labour government, working with the Liberal Democrats, will bring about serious reform. The likelihood, for all David Cameron's promises, is that the Conservatives will not be radical enough, especially on fair votes. But Mr Brown has shown himself incapable of collaborating in this way. His disastrous announcement of expenses reform on YouTube showed that he cannot build the coalitions of interest (inside his party, never mind beyond) that are necessary for constitutional change. If reform is not to stall, someone else will have to lead it.

Rapid contest

The mechanics will not be easy to arrange. Change will always be a gamble. Mr Brown, on past form, may fight for his job. But he cannot last if his cabinet refuses to back him, faced with an inward-looking and isolationist reshuffle that leaves the prime minister at odds with the mood of his own parliamentary party.

Any handover should be rapid and democratic. There will have to be an election for leader, and clarity from the candidates about when they want to hold a general election. Labour's constitution is murky, and some argue that it would be impossible to hold a contest quickly. They worry that the party might squander much of the time it has left in power in debates and union votes.

They are wrong. The 2007 contest for deputy leader took less than two months. Former party officials confirm a contest now could be held in 23 days; the new prime minister could be in place by early July. Several ministers would make a better leader than Mr Brown, and want to stand. They should say so early next week.

After such a contest, parliament could sit longer into the summer and return early in September, as Nick Clegg suggested in the Guardian last week. A bill should allow a referendum on electoral reform on the date of the next election. There should be a guarantee that no former MPs and party officials will be sent to the House of Lords. A bill should be passed to establish fixed terms for parliaments, as works well in Scotland, setting the date for the next election.

The opposition will want one immediately, but a new leader can make the case for some time to establish themselves, for reform laws to pass and for parties to pick new candidates. They could also argue that David Cameron needs to be tested properly. An election now would see Britain stumble into the future without any idea where it will lead.

Before polling day, the public also needs to know the score on all MPs - not just that proportion subjected to the Daily Telegraph's treatment so far. The most open way to do this would be for every editor, and broadcaster, to be sent the disc now in the hands of one paper, with the onus of meeting data protection and defamation laws on the publishers. Parties will need time after that to find new candidates.

Progressive future

The needs of the Labour party and the country are obviously not the same. Labour members must ask themselves this weekend whether they think Mr Brown is best placed to put its values into action, and win popular support for them. The public, in tomorrow's elections, will consider whether Mr Brown is the right man to lead the country. And anyone advocating a change of leadership must make it clear whose interests will gain from it. This paper believes Britain has often been at its best when Labour has been at its strongest. People who disagree with that will welcome its implosion, knowing that it will make a Conservative landslide inevitable. That is why they are not clamouring for Mr Brown to go. Progressive thinkers do not have this luxury. Of course many people, who see the better angels in Mr Brown's nature, do not want his dreams to end like this. His premiership would be one of the briefest in history. He would never have fought an election. But fate can be unjust.

All must agree that the die is cast and a hard judgment made. Otherwise progressive politics will be dragged down at a general election in May 2010 that could lead to a much bigger defeat than Labour suffered in 1979. That might bring a chance for other parties to take it forward, as the Liberal Democrats are trying to do in this election. But they are not placed to enter government. Labour has a year left before an election; its current leader would waste it. It is time to cut him loose.

Viva la Revolucion...

...but 49 years in power is more than enough, camarada.