Bernard Ingham: Let's have a little bit of social outrage from Mr Miliband

FOR the sheer devastation inflicted on British politics by Margaret Thatcher, you need only look at one man: Labour leader, Ed Miliband.

In fact, Prime Minister David Cameron would serve nearly as well if he were not a more complex animal. He is not just a pretty face.

Nor is Miliband junior, just one with such a curious cast to him that he has already launched a thousand comments.

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He is no slouch intellectually, if not yet fast on his feet. He is not without ruthlessness. Otherwise, he would not have done down his elder brother for the party leadership. He is certainly not without courage or he would not keep coming back for more at Prime Minister's Questions.

He is also not entirely without political nous or he would not have constructed his Shadow Cabinet with an eye to curbing rivals such as the Ballses, balancing the Blair/Brown factions and coping with the mark of Cain that his election by the trade unions has stamped upon him.

He suffers, like most modern politicians, for not having done what an old-fashioned mother would describe as a proper job. But his real problem is that he is literally a blank sheet of paper. He has no idea what his party stands for or, for that matter, what principles should or could guide it.

This may not be as disastrous as it seems with Cameron absolved by coalition from drawing lines in the sand and standing up to be counted. Miliband may have well over four years to develop his appeal. A certain deliberation may also be helpful as he tries to pick his way through Labour's warring tribes.

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But all this does not help you to make your mark at Westminster. Instead of being a striker, you become a deep-lying centre forward, as Harold Wilson put it, purloining the talents of Len Shackleton, or was it Leeds United's Don Revie?

The question is how long Miliband the Younger will lie deep or, perhaps more realistically, how long he will be allowed the luxury of a butterfly's measured evolution from grub to ethereal splendour.

This is where we come back to Thatcher the Impaler. Her conviction politics has driven a stake through the heart of British political certainties. She ended Clement Attlee's well-meant but decayed post-war consensus that produced a corporate state nominally run by the Government, CBI and TUC, but in practice controlled by the union barons.

In its place, she showed what less government, greater freedom, more enterprise and personal responsibility and bringing unions within a framework of law could do. The living was not always easy or the prospect pleasing but it eventually produced the goods and more than 20 years of rising prosperity, give or take a cycle or two.

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It left only Blair with no alternative but to sound the retreat from pale pink socialism and regroup under the New Labour banner. His triple success at the polls hid the fact that he did not wean his party of its particular sort of socialism or produce a new coherent Labour philosophy. He was all talk.

Gordon Brown, who followed, was, quite simply, all confusion. What on earth did Brown stand for except a violent, gnashing, Scottish dictatorship?

This is Ed Miliband's thankless legacy, though he will have to work hard for sympathy after his closeness to Brown.

So what should he do? Well, just as Cameron advances, he hopes, towards the sunny uplands on waves of optimistic enthusiasm so Labour's new leader might at least discover some sense of burning dissatisfaction with what British society has become.

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That would not be easy for a leader whose party has just emerged from 13 years of mis-managing our affairs. But it would have the merit of demonstrating some humility and resolve to work towards remedying failure.

It would be all the more convincing if he approached this redemption by bluntly telling his party to decide what they want – whether, for example, they want to unleash opportunity among the working classes or keep them captive in ghetto comprehensives for no better reason than outdated dogma.

If Maggie's conviction has frightened the horses, then for God's sake let's have some anger. There is still a lot to be angry about. It would become a Labour leader and contrast sharply with what might be seen as Cameronian complacency.

But has Ed, the Labour patrician, the slightest part of social outrage in him? Cameron, the Eton toff and Thatcher's child, probably has more.