Viewers of X-Factor will be familiar that contestants are not only judged on whether they can sing but also on their "back story" - their family and career background. I'm afraid it is a bit like that for politicians. It is not just about their policies and beliefs but also their background. David Cameron was attacked for having been to Eton. Margaret Thatcher attracted considerable interest when elected as Tory leader for being a woman and a grocer's daughter. John Major was the boy from Brixton. Gordon Brown the son of the manse.
What about Red Ed? He grow up in a big house in Primrose Hill, the son of a Marxist sociologist. He never had a real job - being fixed up with a post working for Tony Benn and then working for Gordon Brown. The only significant entry he gets in Tony Blair's memoirs was of Blair asking Brown not to mention a meeting to Ed - because Blair didn't trust Ed not to leak details to the press.
Once in London, Ralph (né Adolphe) Miliband studied at the London School of Economics under Harold Laski, who later obtained a lectureship for him there. He settled in Primrose Hill, in the house David still owns, married one of his students, the equally ardent socialist Marion Kozak, and preached the gospel of class warfare: first at the LSE, later in Leeds, finally as a freelance transatlantic ideologue.
From the 1950s, Ralph was one of the high priests of British Marxism. Although less familiar than E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams or Eric Hobsbawm, Miliband was highly effective in using his academic pulpit to urge Labour activists to abandon what he contemptuously described as “parliamentary socialism”. In the 1960s, he was seen as a luminary of the “New Left”, a phrase much invoked by student protesters against the Vietnam War and by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In reality, there was nothing very new about the New Left: like their European and US counterparts, they were a product of capitalist affluence, and their pathetic attempts to distance Marxism from the Soviet Union were unconvincing.
These were the years when universities became political battlegrounds. When the LSE kicked out some of its extremists, Miliband resigned to form the Council for Academic Freedom and Democracy—an Orwellian title, given the Left’s intolerance of dissent. In the late 1970s, he became close to Tony Benn during the period when a Bennite takeover of the Labour Party looked possible. Later, in the mid-1980s, Miliband set up the Chesterfield Socialist Conferences in Benn’s constituency, in a vain attempt to shore up the crumbling intellectual credibility of the Left. Revered by trade unionists and Labour activists, Miliband revelled in creating groupuscules with names such as Socialist Society and Socialist Movement, besides by his peers, journals such as New Left Review and Socialist Register. He took himself, and was taken very seriously.
Then Ed got selected to stand as a Labour candidate for Doncaster North. It wasn't exactly a stitch up but according to Labour Uncut:
Ed Miliband got enormous assistance from the Brown machine. The then chancellor phoned members personally on his behalf, as did the then education secretary, Ruth Kelly.
Does this amount to a captivating "back story"?
