The Labour Party is at a crossroads. It has lost an election, and lost power, but its position is far from disastrous. Labour has nearly a hundred more MPs than the Tories did in 1997, and its in-fighting over the last few years has been nowhere near as debilitating as Tory civil war was in the 1990s. Morale is high, based on the party’s recovery from potential electoral annihilation a year ago to a very respectable performance. It is in opposition to a coalition – ripe for division. The vision that coalition will apparently try to govern by – David Cameron’s ‘big society’ – is vague, and has not yet won over the electorate. There is no reason why Labour ought to face a long spell in opposition: the party can realistically target winning the next election.

Whether it can win depends on one factor above all others, its choice of leader. It needs a leader who can be combative in Parliamentary debate, and in TV debates at the next election. It needs a leader who can start acting, from day one, as a Prime Minister in waiting, above all, by having an agenda for government. It needs a leader strong enough to resist the temptations of class warfare and negative tactics. It needs a leader absolutely surely of what they stand for, and what they are in politics for. It needs a leader who can offer something that the Tories and the Lib Dems can’t.

David Miliband is not this person. If Labour make the mistake of electing such a lightweight, he will lead them to utter irrelevancy. Miliband is a man so confused about what he believes in that as Foreign Secretary he repeatedly antagonised foreign leaders and dismayed civil servants with rash, reckless comments, such as the time he described terrorism as being sometimes ‘justifiable’ and ‘effective’. He is capable of appaling tactlessness, tastelessness and thoughtlessness, like the time he chose the Taj Hotel in Mumbai as a venue for a speech attacking the ‘war on terror’. His background is identical to that of Cameron and Clegg: a well-educated, upper-middle class white man, with a background in think-tanks and PR, who went into politics for the intellectual challenge and to satisfy schoolboy ambitions. If Labour elect Miliband, he will be their IDS: vacant, visionless and insipid.

There is only one senior Labour MP with the clout to take on a united Cameron and Clegg: only one MP who came into politics with a clear agenda for change, who has turned their agenda into actual legislation in the past, who has proved an ability both to take down Tories in the House, and to win votes. Harriet Harman won the support of Labour members who elected her Deputy Leader, and of her constituents, having turned what was once a marginal constituency into a safe seat. Harriet Harman is so sure of what she believes in and so willing to fight for her views that she took MI5 to the European Courts when she found out they were keeping illegal files on her. Whether or not one agrees with her agenda, one has to respect her record.

In our apparently post-ideological age, what other politician has articulated such clear principles, let alone enshrined them in law? Harriet Harman is, of course, divisive, arrogant, and insensitive. This does not mean unelectable: Thatcher was these things too, and she won three landslides. Unelectable is not divisive; unelectable is listless and undignified, like the late Michael Foot, like IDS, and like Miliband. If Labour MPs can persuade Harman to run for leader, they can take the fight to the government in the next Parliament and present a real case to the electorate in five years time.

Filed under: labour, ukpolitics on May 14th, 2010