I couldn't vote labour at the election in 2010. I felt like they'd lost their way, and they shouldn't stay in power just because they weren't the Tories. They should have to be better than that. I voted lib dem, for nothing more than a vote for proportional representation. So that worked out well; especially as I was in a labour safe seat and my vote counted for NOTHING.
So having voted against them, I joined the Labour Party to try to help rebuild it. When the leadership election came around, you had two millibands and bunch of chancers with joke manifestos. Dave was the shoe-in. He was also desperately blairite, slick, and probably would have won.
The millibands are an interesting dynasty, and I quite liked fact that that they were part of a born-and-bred jewish intellectually-socialist family. And even in that fold, there were clear differences between Ed and Dave's politics; dave the blairite and Ed the union man. He was unpolished, definitely to the left of dave, and probably with the union support, he just poked through to win.
Soon after, I left the Labour Party again; I was paying every month for no clear gain. Ed soon seemed to do two things that disappointed me; take bad advice to try to come across well and mask his oddities, and not push any debate with the Tories at all. They seemed to merely seek to moderate the Tories rhetoric, rather than oppose it. They missed plenty of open goals, that they didn't seem to notice, and it seemed that every week there was another pronouncement from the condems with no visible response from ed & co.
Over the next 4 years, ed & co continued to be a practically invisible unpresence in politics. Despite this, ed was at his worse when trying to play the politics game; rather than just be the weird ideas man he really is. We're meant to believe that such people don't make good leaders, probably by 'leader' types who think the world owes them a living. Ed reminds me of that guy from the apprentice a few years ago, with his curved emery board; he just got on with everybody in quite a nice way, and won without having to resort to aggressive bickering. I just feel that if ed had stuck to *being ed* he'd have had more support.
It took ed & co far too long to get going, and I think the late rush, that we all thought was going to happen, never really could because of the lack of groundwork and lack of any presence.
So I'll miss ed, and I feel like he never made the opportunities he needed, took the opportunities he had, or stood up for his own qualities. Maybe I'm assuming too much about someone I hardly knew, but when it seemed like we could have an heir to Disraeli in power, I felt things might be ok.
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