Ed Miliband: the police caution

The husband and I were out at the Faculty this afternoon (preparing a party for returning alumni) when the result of the Labour leadership election was announced. I'm not sure how curious we really were to find out which Miliband had been elected -- and not sure what difference it would make anyway (I guess if I had still been a member of the Labour Party I would have thrown my vote away on Diane Abbott).But we turned on the BBC News on the computer in the office to see it anyway.

The husband has had strong views on most of the candidates. On Miliband (E), the victor as it turns out, he has had little time for the line about how he was against the Iraq War, ID cards and the rest. True, he may not have been in parliament when we took the decision to invade Iraq. But did we actually hear him objecting from the sidelines?

Not a bit of it.

It's easy to pull your morality out of the bottom drawer a few years later, if you weren't formally implicated in the decision;  but that's not the point. The average criminal when arrested, has the caution read out: "You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you fail to mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court..."

Doesn't that apply to the line of the young Miliband. No head above the parapet when we needed him, and now it's all about how he was on the side of the good all along. It hasn't convinced the jury in Cambridge. Particularly because it was he who wrote the botched Labour manifesto for the last election.

But we will see.

Meanwhile, for something more cerebral, you can see me having a go at writing an All Souls Prize Fellowship essay here.

I did it in an hour, no cheating -- though following the advice of friends who knew about this particular competition: be clever, abstruse, witty, a bit from left field..and play to your classical strengths.

See what you think.

PS. Sunday morning ..... I dont usually add to posts once they are posted, but we woke up to the radio finding plenty to say about the history of brothers in politics, re Dave and Ed. Surprisingly, they missed a classical trick. The obvious pair who came into my mind were, of course, Romulus and Remus, and we know what happened to them. (For those who cant recall -- Romulus killed Remus, after Remus had jumped over the walls of Romulus' new city).

So maybe it would be wise for Dave to call it a day and get out of politics. But where? If all you have ever done is work in the Labour party machine, you're not trained for much. Maybe, the husband mused, he should go back to Oxford and do a DPhil?