Labour challengers go Ed to Ed

IF the five Labour leadership contenders have learnt anything over the past four months, it is how to talk a good game.

Shadow Education Secretary Ed Balls is convinced people are changing their minds about him after taking the coalition to task, but is concerned the final 14 days before the result is announced may not be enough time for him to transform the contest.

“I think the campaigning I’ve done on schools and [Education Secretary] Michael Gove and on the economy has meant lots of people are thinking again about who to vote for,” says the Morley and Outwood MP. “If that will be enough for me, I don’t know.”

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The bookies do not give the 43-year-old much of a chance – they, like most commentators, expect this to come down to a fight between the two Miliband brothers, David and Ed. Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham and Left-winger Diane Abbott are also dismissed as rank outsiders.

With the finishing line in sight, Shadow Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, the Doncaster North MP, is feeling “increasingly confident” about winning. “I think momentum is with me in this campaign,” he says.

“I think there is a sense that I’m not the candidate of the establishment and people are rallying to that cause. I think people are rallying to the fact I can bring change to the Labour Party and change to Britain.”

He even says he is “already starting to turn my thoughts to” what he would say in the keynote leader’s speech he would have to deliver on the Tuesday of party conference. “In the eventuality you win ... you want to have a speech prepared,” he says.

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Tomorrow night in Leeds their confidence will be put to the test as they turn up to yet another hustings – this time of young party members.

Both are bidding to become the first MP from a Yorkshire constituency to lead Labour since Hugh Gaitskell, the Leeds South MP who died in 1963. While Harold Wilson – who succeeded him and went on to enter Downing Street – was born in Huddersfield, he was never an MP in the region.

Not that either would have passed the qualification test to play cricket for Yorkshire in days gone by, although Mr Miliband lived for five years in Horsforth, Leeds, until he was seven. “It made me a Leeds United fan,” he says, although he admits he has little chance to follow them.

Was it a formative period? “I was only seven when we left but my earliest childhood memories are of being in Leeds and going to school in Leeds,” he says. “I have limited memories, but fond memories.”

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Now 40 and preparing to be a father for the second time, he returned north in 2005, winning the safe Doncaster North seat after becoming an economic adviser to then-Chancellor Gordon Brown.

“Everything about my time in Doncaster and time as a Doncaster MP is what informs my politics,” he says, insisting it keeps his “feet on the ground”.

It was 2005, too, when Mr Balls won his Normanton seat - close to wife Yvette Cooper’s Pontefract and Castleford constituency.

But as a high-profile and controversial figure – having been at Mr Brown’s side for a decade as war raged between the Chancellor and Tony Blair – the last election campaign was a different, bruising, experience as he was heavily targeted by the Tories in the new Morley and Outwood constituency, squeaking home with a massively dented majority.

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“It makes you see unless you’re out there the whole time campaigning hearing and speaking the language of your constituents, understanding concerns of people, you can’t be effective,” he says.

Even Mr Balls’s detractors recognise he has landed more blows on the coalition than any other challenger, forcing Education Secretary Michael Gove into humiliating apologies over the botched announcement of cancelled school rebuilding projects. Privately many Tories admit that of the five contenders he would be the most combative opponent at the Despatch Box, although they also think the baggage of the past 13 years would be a gift.

If he is the gritty street fighter, Mr Miliband cuts more of a cosmopolitan figure. Indeed, they may both be in their 40s, privately educated former Treasury advisers and share policy ideas like a graduate tax and opposition to the speed of coalition cuts, but they are markedly different characters.

Mr Miliband has put a campaign for a living wage – significantly higher than the minimum wage – at the heart of his pitch and combined the might of union backing with an ability to inspire an army of volunteers, many of them young and having signed up to Labour simply to support his campaign.

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The volunteer network is, he says, his “secret weapon”. While the money is now flooding in, for much of the campaign he has been comfortably outspent by his brother, “ but we have not been out-organised”.

If both Eds can unite on one thing, it is the less than glowing references they recently received from Mr Blair as he published his memoirs.

“I think generally people want to move on from New Labour and people understand New Labour was right for its time,” says Mr Miliband, who was widely seen to have been the target when the former Prime Minister effectively backed his brother David by warning the party against moving to the Left. “I think the interventions that have been designed to hurt my candidacy have overall helped my candidacy.”

Meanwhile Mr Balls – accused of “behaving badly” at times by Mr Blair who branded some of his views on public spending as “nonsense” and “truly muddled” – wryly highlights the former Prime Minister’s description of him as having strong leadership qualities and guts, although he says he is “not going to go as far as saying Tony Blair gave me an endorsement”.

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Come a fortnight’s time, and the unveiling of the winner at the start of the party’s conference in Manchester, both men insist they will respect the result. Mr Balls does little to dampen speculation he would cherish the Shadow Chancellor’s brief as a reward for his combative campaign, while Mr Miliband says the party must unite its forces against the coalition.

“I think, immediately there’s a leader in place, it’s time for us to get on with the business of being in opposition,” he says. “We’ve tried to do that as well, but inevitably when you’ve got a leadership contest that can take up the oxygen of publicity for the party.

“I think Harriet [Harman]’s done a very good job of standing in, but I think we’ve then got to move on.”

Tom Richmond: Page 15.