British Foreign Secretary David Miliband called for a "radical new phase" in the government's reform platform yesterday, widely interpreted as an implicit challenge to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
His comment piece in the Guardian newspaper comes less than a week after a crushing by-election defeat for the ruling Labour Party in a formerly safe seat, and just a day after the party’s deputy leader was forced to publicly deny plotting a campaign to replace Brown as Labour leader.
Miliband, who was seen as a potential challenger to Brown when Tony Blair stepped down as prime minister last year, does not explicitly criticise Brown in the article, but also does not endorse him as the right person for the job.
Brown is not mentioned at all in the entire article.
The 43-year-old Miliband instead admitted that health reforms should have been implemented sooner than they were, better planning had been needed to deal with the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq invasion and the government should have led a stronger campaign for a environmentally-friendly economy.
“The odds are against us, no question,” Miliband acknowledged, with recent opinion polls having put Labour more than 15 percentage points behind the main opposition Conservatives.
“But I still believe we can win the next election. ... The starting point is not debating personalities but winning the argument about our record, our vision for the future and how we achieve it,” he said.
He wrote that the Conservatives lacked a vision for the country just when “the times demand a radical new phase.”
“New Labour won three elections by offering real change, not just in policy but in the way we do politics,” Miliband wrote. “We must do so again.”
The Guardian itself noted that Miliband’s willingness to wade into the party debate about how to defeat the Conservatives “will be seen as a reminder to a demoralised party that there are figures in the Cabinet capable of making a compelling analysis of Labour’s political challenges.”
Similarly, the Daily Mail wrote in an editorial that Miliband’s comments “suggest an overweening ambition.”
The Times, meanwhile, wrote on its front page that the article “fires the first salvo in a deliberate challenge to Mr Brown ... [and] outlines a blueprint for defeating [Conservative leader] David Cameron without mentioning the prime minister once by name.”
The latter two newspapers both reported, however, that Brown’s Downing Street office had known about the article beforehand and was relaxed about its content, citing unnamed sources.
On Tuesday, Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman, who has been filling in for Brown in Downing Street while he has been on holiday, insisted in a public statement that she was not “preparing the ground for a leadership election.”
Last week Labour lost a by-election in Glasgow East, conceding a majority of more than 13,000 votes, its third such defeat in as many months.
Two separate opinion polls published earlier this week by the Times and the Daily Telegraph have put Labour 16 points and 19 points behind the opposition, with the latter showing 74 percent of voters are dissatisfied with the prime minister.
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