Message to Ed Miliband: get brother David back asap

WHEN he was running the Downing Street press office for Tony Blair, Alistair Campbell liked to have a 'Minister for the Today Programme', a senior figure such as Margaret Beckett or John Reid who could be sent out to joust with Humphrys, Naughtie et al on whatever was that day's hot potato issue.
 
Memories of that role were stirred a few days before Christmas when a senior Labour figure popped up on Today to heap scorn and derision on David Cameron's veto at the European summit in Paris.
 
Clearly and confidently, David Miliband explained that Cameron's gesture was "the first veto in history not to stop something. The plans are going ahead. It was a phantom veto against a phantom threat."
 
The former Foreign Secretary's masterly performance was a reminder for Labour supporters of what they lost when David announced he would not stand for the Shadow Cabinet after a narrow defeat to his younger brother Ed in the September 2010 leadership election.
 
David's aim in retreating was to avoid "constant comparison" with his brother, and to evade the "perpetual, distracting and destructive attempts to find division where there is none, and splits where they don't exist, all to the detriment of the party's cause".

But withdrawing to the shadows has failed to achieve that, as was demonstrated by the last Prime Minister's Questions of 2011. When Ed Miliband sought to exploit the rift between Cameron and his Europhile deputy Nick Clegg over the veto, Cameron hit back: "Let me reassure him he shouldn't believe everything he reads in the papers. It's not that bad. It's not like we're brothers or anything."

As his backbenchers hooted in delight, Cameron observed: "He certainly walked into that one."

Ed Miliband has made it clear that he would like his brother in his team. Now there are signs that David is under pressure from supporters to make himself available. Labour's polling guru Philip Gould, who died in November, was friends with both men and urged them to join forces for the good of the party. That is being echoed by others who supported David for the leadership.
 
One Labour peer told me: "David has to decide. He either has to quit politics altogether or he has to return to the front bench. His current position is unsustainable. "
 
There is nothing to stop it happening. In the past, when in opposition, all members of the Shadow Cabinet had to be elected by Labour MPs. But Ed Miliband engineered a rule change scrapping that system. He alone decides who is in his top team.

Today's headline-grabbing complaint from Lord Glasman that Ed has "no strategy and little energy" should be taken with a pinch of salt: Glasman is regarded in Labour circles as a pretty lightweight academic who ironically only enjoys any prominence because Ed himself decided to befriend him.

But Glasman has voiced in part what others have been muttering and, together with recent polls putting the Tories ahead of Labour, it serves to emphasise the message: Ed should get his big brother into the Shadow Cabinet sooner rather than later. ·