Calamity Ed is a numpty. So why should we listen to this walking disaster zone on ANYTHING?
OVER the past few days, TV viewers may have been driven to distraction by a low, fuzzy and annoyingly repetitive drone. Before you set about your living room with a fly swat and do terrible damage to your china knick-knacks and family photo-frames, let me stress that the sound has not been made by that October hornet bouncing against the window panes.
It has coincided with the reappearance, in TV studio discussions and on the BBC’s Parliament channel, of a tall man with donkey teeth and bulgy eyes, talking balderdash.
Yes folks, just when you thought it was safe to take a fresh interest in our wonderfully liberated post-Brexit politics, that serial meddler Ed Miliband is back.
The political mastermind who led Labour over a cliff in the 2015 general election is now championing backbench Opposition protests against Brexit. He has formed an alliance with that other electoral genius Nick Clegg. Between them, they hope to gum up the Government’s programme of leaving the EU following June’s referendum.
Miliband! He of the preposterous granite ‘Edstone’ of pledges he was going to erect in the garden of No 10 after sweeping to power. He of the ‘ hell yeah, ah’m tough enough’ machismo in an election TV debate with Jeremy Paxman. He of the crucial party conference speech in which he omitted to mention — he forgot it! — the national deficit.
Some 17.4 million people may have voted triumphantly for Brexit but this clown and his pal Clegg, along with a gaggle of apoplectic Euroluvvies including a few Left- wing Tories, think they know better. They are putting up a barrage of legalistic complaints, parliamentary ruses, publicity stunts and bogus outrage in the hope of creating maximum confusion.
You should have heard the clucking and melodramatic shrieks in the Commons yesterday during an Opposition day debate on Brexit. These anti- democrats are behaving as though the EU referendum never happened. Or do they think those 17.4 million ballot papers were incorrectly counted?
Unpatriotic
By creating such a stink about Brexit, Miliband & Co suspect they can damage Britain’s prospects in the international financial markets — tactics that, for my money, look nakedly unpatriotic.
If they can make the May Government seem sufficiently beleaguered — and with the BBC in full Euro-bias mode, they are receiving every assistance — it will weaken sterling.
If the pound goes into a prolonged tailspin, that might force Theresa May to renege on some of her so-far admirable commitments to heed the democratic will of the British people and take us out of the European federalist project with its uncontrolled immigration and rapacious trading fees.
In some ways Mr Miliband’s emergence as a leading ‘Bremoaner’ (as these pessimistic Brexit- deniers are called) is great news for those of us who voted Leave.
After all, ‘Red Ed’ is widely understood by the British public to be a total noodle. Voters were given more than adequate sight and sound of him during the five years he was Leader of the Opposition, and from the way they voted for the Conservative Party in May 2015, you might conclude that he wasn’t to their liking.
Here, after all, is Westminster’s version of Frank Spencer. Do you remember beret-wearing Frank, from the Seventies TV show Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em? He reduced to ruin anything he touched. The same can be said of Mr Miliband, though there, perhaps, the comedy ends.
Damage
With the plight of Syria much in our minds now, it is worth remembering that Miliband was the Labour leader who, three years ago, ordered his MPs to stop the Coalition Government making what could have been an early, decisive intervention in the Syrian conflict.
David Cameron, then Prime Minister, was under the impression that Mr Miliband had given him a private assurance to put aside party political devilment and support intervention, which many say could have changed the course of the war.
But at the final moment Mr Miliband changed tack and inflicted a rare Commons defeat on a Government on a military motion. It won Labour a few days of bragging rights but left Syria’s vulnerable masses undefended. Admittedly, this is a complex situation but innocents have been dying under the Assad regime’s Russian bombs ever since.
Ruin of a more metaphorical nature was inflicted by Mr Miliband on his own sorry party. Quite apart from his fruitless spell as Opposition leader, he changed the party’s rules for electing a new leader, introducing ‘one man one vote’ and allowing new Labour members to cast their ballot for a leader as long as they paid a £3 party membership fee.
New members duly flocked to join, most voting for the maverick Jeremy Corbyn last summer, leading to Labour’s current opinion poll slump to 17 points behind the Tories.
Again, Mr Miliband’s natural opponents may want to give him a medal, for he has done his own side terrible damage. Those with a deeper investment in the health of British politics will see it is far from desirable for a Government to face such a weak Opposition.
We can add to that Miliband roll of ruin such further disasters as his opposition to House of Lords reform (again, because he was playing silly games — he really is as slippery as a shampooed tennis ball) and his almost complete loss of Labour’s Scottish fiefdom to the Scots Nats.
Scottish voters examined this flubbering former special adviser with his patronising Primrose Hill airs and decided, not unreasonably, that he had nothing in common with them.
But then, Miliband’s whole career has been narrow in its cultural scope. After Oxford and that greenhouse for Lefties, the London School of Economics, he became a researcher on a Channel 4 politics show.
Then he became a Harriet Harman speechwriter (to make her sound sensible is, admittedly, a hellish task) and had a spell as a New Labour aide before being found a supposedly safe seat in Doncaster.
Privilege
His constituents voted for Brexit by 69 per cent, yet Mr Miliband seeks to frustrate their will. Must we really tolerate lessons in ‘democracy’ from such a figure?
This is not a seasoned man of the world who has developed a political vision for himself. He has prospered thanks to privilege, connections, networking — just the sort of world you find in Brussels.
It began in his boyhood when he was introduced to top Labour figures by his Marxist philosopher father Ralph. Young Ed was spoon-fed his doctrines and he has invariably gone with the bien pensant crowd. He is no more original than the sort of music they play in department store lifts.
Even when he became Energy Minister — where he introduced the ruinously expensive Climate Change Act to reduce carbon emissions, which will apparently cost us £18 billion a year until 2050 — there was a belief