My 9½ weeks of Calamity Ed
When political kingmaker Martin Winter agreed to turn young Ed Miliband into an MP, he was aghast at the bumbling oddball who came to stay. Now, in a book that will rock Labour, he reveals bombshell confession of the man who wants to be PM...
IT’S A devastating indictment of the Labour leader by the man who made him an MP. Fallout, the forthcoming book by Martin Winter, a former Labour Mayor of Doncaster, serialised here, reveals a portrait of the young Ed Miliband that would be funny were it not so shocking. For in nine and half weeks between March and May 2005, when the Winter family took Miliband into their home and orchestrated his election as MP for Doncaster North, we see the future leader almost set himself alight, buy a prayer mat to cover scorch marks to his office carpet and be out-negotiated by the Winters’ three young children.
But amid the farce there is a bombshell confession: Miliband tells Winter that Ed Balls backed a snap General Election in 2007 because ‘the economy is going to fall off a cliff and this is our best chance of winning an Election’.
It is a revelation that Winter has no doubt will infuriate the Labour high command, but last night he vowed to face down any attempt by ‘Labour attack dogs’ to undermine his explosive revelations.
Winter said he expected Miliband’s allies to condemn him for revealing the private conversations. But he had no regrets about speaking out.
‘People are entitled to know the truth about a man who wants to be Prime Minister,’ he said. ‘My partner Carolyne and I know him better than most Labour MPs – he lived with us and we made him an MP.
‘We also know that he cannot be trusted. In 2007, he told both of us in our sitting room that the economy was going to “fall off a cliff” a year before it did – and that Labour had cynically planned an early General Election for that reason.
‘Labour attack dogs may try to deny it – just like they did when in 2008 Alistair Darling was Chancellor and said the crash was coming. But they are wasting their time. Carolyne was present with me when Ed Miliband said it and she has been a card-carrying member of the party since she was 18.’
Winter, 52, was feted by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown after he rescued the last Labour Government’s flagship scheme to introduce US-style directly elected mayors. Blair believed they would root out town hall corruption – and nowhere was it worse than Labour-run Doncaster. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, more than 20 councillors were convicted of fraud and half a dozen were jailed in the ‘Donnygate’ scandal, one of the widest-reaching incidents of town hall corruption in British history.
In 2002, former rugby league player Winter stood for election as mayor on an anti-corruption manifesto – and won. He was invited to Downing Street and sat next to Blair at a Cabinet-style summit to reform local government.
In March 2005, then Chancellor Gordon Brown asked him to help Ed Miliband, his chief economic adviser, win Doncaster North when the sitting MP fell ill. At a secret meeting in the Treasury, Winter promised Brown he would secure the safe Labour seat for Miliband.
During the campaign, Miliband moved in with the Winter family and used their home as his base for nine and a half weeks. Miliband won with Winter’s help, going on to become Labour leader five years later.
Having been re-elected as mayor, Winter left the Labour Party and then stepped down in 2009 due to renewed infighting and a series of social services scandals in which seven children known to the council died within three years.
An Audit Commission report said Labour councillors spent more time ‘pursuing long-term political antagonisms’ than improving services.
The book Winter has now written tells how he was recruited by Labour chiefs to end corruption and feuding in Doncaster – and his success in boosting the town’s economic growth with a dynamic regeneration portfolio. The second half tells the story of his falling out with Labour as Winter’s enemies ‘tried to destroy me despite all my loyalty to the party – and to Miliband’.