Crash Bang Wallace

Every decent campaign has a theme and a strategy that are intended to run throughout every event, leaflet, speech and soundbite.

When you see a politician campaigning you’re not watching someone in their natural state, you’re watching them go out of their way to make up for their flaws, emphasise their strengths and answer any qualms you may have about them.

While this is an attempt at deception, the choice of personality they try to project can give us an insight into what they are really thinking in private.

So it was with David Miliband’s “Movement for Change” rally in Pimlico yesterday. Remarkably, the whole event was essentially the launch of an entirely new David Miliband with a totally new character.

Of course messages are normally updated in reaction to a changing campaign, but such a comprehensive wiping clean of the slate suggests that the people running his candidacy felt they had real problems with the product they were trying to sell.

From the new model, we can reverse engineer what his own campaign thought the old D-Mil Mk1 was like and why they wanted to scrap him.

Let’s identify the key themes.

1) The whole event had an obvious Obama theme - the use of the word “change” as a core message, the encouragement to wave placards, and the whipping up of an almost Beatlemania atmosphere.

2) The decision to make the event a “congress” of the “Movement for Change” rather than a David Miliband for Leader rally.

3) The heavy involvement of “ordinary people” to pour out their hearts on stage or sing ballads.

4) Most crucially, the declaration by the man himself that he had experienced a road to Damascus moment – reject the politics of “committee rooms” in favour of  the politics of the “streets”.

At its heart, the event was shouting “David Miliband is an exciting, radical outsider who likes real people and has nothing to do with the old David Miliband.”

What does that tell us?

It suggests that the campaign finally got wise to the problems with a candidate who was perceived as an intellectual, establishment figure, divorced from real Labour Party activism and more comfortable in Whitehall meetings than Constituency Labour Party leafleting drives.

At best, as Jackie Ashley said in the Guardian, David Miliband was the “least kerfuffle” candidate – a geeky, predictable continuation of the general drift of the last few years. His was as a campaign of endorsements and officialdom, not of rallies and screaming crowds.

Given that you’d normally start a campaign by talking up the real persona of your candidate, it’s pretty damning that the DM4Leader campaign have decided to throw out their entire strategy and replace it with a new, artificial one. It’s tantamount to announcing that they consider their man a natural loser, so they’ve decided to build an artificial winner.

The question now is how Labour Party members, Trade Unionists and the PLP respond to the new David Miliband – the one who appeared yesterday like one of those odd American stadium-filling faith healers or firebrand preachers.

They might well like an Obama-style candidate like that. But will they believe this is a truly re-born man, or just the old one after some pretty radical cosmetic surgery to make him look better?