Jonathan Reed: Miliband clears the first hurdle

BARELY four months ago, Ed Miliband was celebrating after holding on to his safe Doncaster seat, still little known outside the circles of Labour's elite.

Only an MP since 2005, ministerial jobs inside the relatively low-profile Cabinet Office and Department of Energy and Climate Change meant he was a far less familiar face than his older and longer serving brother David who had reached the heights of the Foreign Office.

After deciding to enter the fray of the leadership battle, he began to be recognised more often by members of the public but was still struggling to enter the national consciousness. In a fish and chip shop on holiday in Cornwall this summer, he was spotted by an onlooker convinced he was a drinker at the local pub.

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Even many Labour Party activists in Manchester admit they know little about the man who became their leader on Saturday which meant that as well as using his first full conference speech as leader to try to unify the party and spell out his vision, he also had a much more basic task – introducing himself to the public.

That is no simple or speedy job, but yesterday he at least made a start.

Aides had billed it beforehand as the most personal speech of his career, and many will have been touched by the story of his Jewish parents' arrival in Britain after fleeing the Nazis – his mother having spent the war on the run sheltering in a convent, then with a Catholic family, and his father and grandfather escaping on one of the last boats out of Belgium in 1940.

"My love for this country comes from this story," he said, describing it as the source of his values and beliefs which "will run through everything I do" and ultimately his inspiration for entering politics.

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There was even a hint of Gordon Brown's "moral compass" in his description of his beliefs and values being "my anchor".

But there was much more significance resting on this speech as well.

Apart from an interview with Andrew Marr on BBC1 on Sunday morning and a few brief words at a string of conference receptions, there has been little heard from the new leader since his acceptance speech nearly

72 hours before in which he announced the arrival of a

"new generation".

The Miliband team are well aware that the fact he failed to win a majority of backing from either MPs or ordinary party members is not going to make their job easy in establishing him as a credible Prime Minister-in- waiting. Tories have been rubbing their hands in glee at being able to portray him as a puppet of the Left at a time of mounting talk over strikes.

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The challenge is only magnified by the uncertainty over the future of his brother, who will reveal today whether he will remain in the Shadow Cabinet.

Supporters of David are split – while some have accepted Ed's victory and are determined to move on as a united party, others are angry that the younger brother had the temerity to challenge him and are deeply sceptical about his ability to turn Labour into a credible opposition.

Yesterday, the stage background had been turned from Saturday's bright red to a pink and purple combination as he sought to kill off his "Red Ed" tag.

For a man accused of lurching to the left, his pledge that "the fiscal credibility we earned before 1997 was hard won and we must win it back by the time of the next general election" was striking, warning activists some coalition cuts will have to be allowed through unopposed even though they may be unpalatable.

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At the same time, he sketched out what could be the start of an alternative economic agenda for Labour – arguing that "what we should not do as a country is make a bad situation worse by embarking on deficit reduction at a pace and at a scale that endangers our recovery" and painting the coalition as "unpatriotic" for prioritising

debt reduction over providing a "society fit for our kids to live in".

With union bosses watching, Mr Miliband suggested he will be willing to deliver a tough message to them, too – a vital step in convincing sceptics he is not in hock to those who delivered him his job – as he warned: "I have no truck, and you should have no truck, with overblown rhetoric about waves of irresponsible strikes."

In a well-constructed speech, there was a mixture of criticising the past and providing a vision for the future. For those hoping the man who had been the outsider would fall at the first hurdle, they were disappointed. The Tories may even wonder if Miliband Junior will pose

more of a challenge than they had anticipated.

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Team Miliband will be content with a speech which went down well, although the work is only just beginning and the latest stage of the Miliband family drama today could yet take the shine off Ed's early success.

Meanwhile, the veterans in the new leader's team will know better than he just how long a journey it is from outsider to occupant of Number 10.

Jonathan Reed is the Yorkshire Post's Political Editor