Saviour of Britain or Weird Robot? An Anatomy of Ed Miliband's Conference Speech

Yesterday, at the Labour Party's annual conference, Ed Miliband tried to convince us he was the saviour of Britain. It wasn't as wildly insolent a move as it may sound, after all a lot of people really want Ed Miliband to be the saviour of Britain. Unfortunately a lot of other people think of him as someone who says the right things, but who is ultimately impossible to connect with, like a weird robot pretending to be your mum. So, let's look at the key aspects of yesterday's speech, and see how he did.

The Carefully Staged Spouse-Stroll to the Auditorium
Ever since the Daily Mail bullied Ed into marrying his baby-momma Justine, Miliband has tried to present himself as a more convincing "suburban dad" kinda guy, rather than the godless metropolitan liberal he so patently is. Ed has made an honest woman out of Justine, is no longer living in sin and so, by the laws of politics, he is now required to allow us all to peer in upon his love for her so that we can assess how big their love is, and whether it's actually any fun or not.

Did it actually look fun? Yes. Sort of.
Do they at least seem more in love than Cam and Sam? Perhaps more settled into the grim reality of their sexual prospects. There's a certain together-in-the-trenches camaraderie in that, isn't there?
Ed's rating: 7/10

The Patriotic Backdrop
The main backdrop was a kind of turquoisey sky colour, with the Union Flag rendered in a very London 2012 shade of purple – off-centre, funked-up, telling Britain that it is edgy and vibrant and cosmopolitan and can still put on big sporting events if it’s got a spare £10 billion lying around. The sky blue seems to be de rigeur at conferences nowadays. The Tories certainly seemed to be trying to claim it as their own – after all, who doesn’t like the sky, apart from Michael Gove? But this was Ed putting on his fierce-Ed face and telling the bigger boys that Labour aren't having it.

Does it make you feel warm inside? Yes, as long as you're not Michael Gove.
Would Tony Blair have done it? A Britain at once modern and traditional? Going back while looking to the future? Aware of our legacy and sure of our tomorrow? We may still be lying in bed with the curtains shut and the ghost of grinning Tony whispering in our ear, but fuck you, it feels nice and we don't have much to do tomorrow anyway.
Ed's rating: 6/10

The Carefully Composed Demographics of the Background Humans
These were less carefully-composed than they could have been, featuring only two people from the demographic to which nearly a quarter of Britons now belong: the obese. Both of them women. Clearly, Ed has his head in the sand when it comes to the male obesity timebomb. Ethnic minorities were scarce, too. One Indian. One Sikh. One black woman. His failure to use more of these people as census-tinsel shows how out of touch Ed is with what Britain really wants (i.e. to be roundly patronised).

But the chief character who kept popping into the corner of Ed’s frame was a very pallid young man of about 19 in a blue suit. In fact, closer inspection revealed that there was not just one, but three of these identikit pale sploddy youths, who had the power-hungry, vacant grimace of the future-Ed. Boys clearly hoping to follow in Ed’s own bag-carrying, career-politico footsteps. The head boys in a coming generation of bag-carrying Ed Youth. The first generation composed entirely of sidemen.

Does it make you feel warm inside? No, because one look at these people reminds you that, when you break it down, person-by-person, often "Britain can’t do better".
Would Tony Blair have done it? Tony invented it.
Ed's Rating: 4/10

The Humanising Anecdote
The phrase "Ed speaks human" was his unofficial, much-riffed-on tagline in the party leadership election, which seems an odd thing to boast about. Yet here he was, trying to convince us all that he has actually never started saying “One zero zero, one one one one, zero zero one, zero zero one” after being left out in the rain, by opening the joint with a story that had nothing to do with anything. It was about a girl who fell off her bike and cracked her skull, and then told him he was an action hero and then said he was nice looking and then she was concussed and then and then and then and then… It was a rare moment of excitement, simply because it felt like after an intro like this, anything could happen. Ed was ripping up the rulebook. And then immediately replacing it with a much stranger rulebook.

Did it make you think: “Ed Miliband. Now there’s a guy I’d trust to come into my house and not to piss on my carpets or accidentally sit on my child?” No.
Ed's Rating: 5/10

Justine Miliband, Ed's wife

The "Who I Am" Bit
Everyone needs to be aware that Ed Miliband came from a home. Just like ordinary people. He had a mum. Just like you, you insignificant decimal fraction of the voting matrix. We know because he told us. “In my house, it was my mum who taught me these values. She’s the most patient, generous person I’ve met in my life.” Apparently, she informed him about what was "right". Why was this a good thing? Because: “Your sense of what is right: that is the only thing that matters.” He didn’t talk so much about Father Miliband, because he was a Marxist academic and celebrated author who dined around the high tables of Hampstead. But that's not the sort of talk that's going to win you votes in Croxteth.

Does it make you feel warm inside? Yes, if standing near or inside a microwave.
Ed's Rating: 6/10

The Soundbyte That Was Endlessly Repeated So That Broadcast News Had It Covered from All Angles and Could Easily Chop It Up Into One of Those Terribly Clever Montages Where He Is Just Saying The Same Thing Over And Over
We were pre-briefed that Ed would be talking about a "new bargain", and assumed that he’d be sniffing the hind quarters of bargain-loving Aldi Mum. Yet that phrase didn’t come up once. Instead, we had: “We’re Britain. We’re Better Than This.” I confidently predict that in his speech next week, D-Cam will use the line: “We’re Britain. We’re Better Than That.” I will await the royalty cheque to the usual address.

Is it the sort of empty inspirational nugget you’d hear from a regional sales director on an away-weekend or more like a rallying speech to a dreams-following X Factor contestant? The former but with undertones of the latter.
Ed's Rating: 6/10

The Power-Gestures
Ed’s power-gestures generally make him look like a man who was interrupted halfway through a very important passage in a book about body language. These books always tell you that palms should face outwards, that gestures should sweep not stab, and move away from the body. And yet it was in an awkward mid-gestural hinterland that Miliband often seemed caught, like a version of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man gone zorbing.

Efforts included:
– The one-hand aloft, fingers up "peace in our time" auditorium showstopper.
– The umpire-like single-finger slow rise: a subtle delight.
– Splayed fingers, hands together at waist level, AKA "the breadbasket prayer". No human who wasn’t speaking to at least 5,000 people has ever done this.

Sadly, the “I’ve got some peanuts in my right hand, and I don’t want them to get wet, so I’ve formed a sort of bulbous fist around them which I’m lowering and raising intermittently” point-emphasiser has a fatal air of middle-management to it. This is not the kind of gesture that gets Prime Ministers elected.

Ed's power level: 5/10

The "I Have Actually Met Some Ordinary People Dontchaknow" Body Count
As we were grimly introduced to, via the 2010 TV debates’ "I once met a black man" farrago, the modern political textbook says that every policy insight needs to be encased in a sturdy real human and put into a narrative form so that Joe and Joanna Thicky McThick Public can understand it. So we had:

– Elsa Phillips, that toddler who fell off her bike and then and then and then and then
– “Young men and women serving in Afghanistan I have met”
– This bloke who wandered up to him in a town square and was incredibly angry
– Two market traders in Chesterfield
– The face in a crowd of an ambulance controller from Lincoln
– A scaffolder who wanted to know about his gas bills
– A 17-year-old girl suffering from depression and anxiety
– A Glaswegian named Cathy who had an operation

Were they a cheery cast of ordinary, hard-working, hard-pressed, NHS-dependent Britons and Briton-esses? Oh yes.
Yes, but has Ed Miliband ever met a black man? If he has, he’s keeping quiet about it.
Ed's Rating: 4/10

The Rictus Applause of a Well-Briefed Audience
Where would these things be without the audience? If Ed Miliband were just lecturing to an empty hall, he’d look completely mental. Voters would laugh at him. So there they were – the clapping machines. If I were a leader, I would occasionally do Simon Says-style things like announce we were going to bomb Latvia while raising my voice in that up-inflection signalling way, just to see if I could make 5,000 people applaud it. Though he got a lot of claps, it may prove fatal to Ed's chances that he neglected to do this.

Spontaneous bursts of applause for merely mentioning the NHS: 3
Unexpected standing ovations that left Ed looking a bit worried: 2
Ed's rating: 6/10

The Avoidance At All Costs of the Voter-Toxic S-Word
Instances of the actual word "socialism": 0
References to sharing the pie more equally: 13
References to a living wage: 9
References to direct market interventions: 12
References to socialism, then: about 88
Ed's rating: 10/10

Post-Speech Hall Music
Naughty Boy (ft Emeli Sande) – "Lifted"

Yes, that's Emile Sande, who is somehow, over a year after it finished, "still riding high on patriotic post-Olympics buzz”. And then there's Naughty Boy, who is the “chart dance producer du jour” during the present “dance is back summer of love (or at least summer of druggy heavy petting)”.

Main message: We’re all going to feel lifted, 'cos things can only get better.
Key embarrassingly off-message lyric: “After all this waiting and this holding on / Suddenly everything was gone”
Does it make you feel warm inside? In the same way that a Jägerbomb does.
Would Tony Blair have done it? We’d like to think TB is in daily contact with Emeli as the personification of the mumsy-yet-youthy, cuddly-yet-vacant middlebrowism he pioneered. Spiritually, she’s his daughter.
Ed's rating: 5/10

ED'S OVERALL RATING: 64/110 – It's official, then: Ed Miliband is the saviour of Britain.

Follow Gavin on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes

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