Mancunian Misery

David Milliband's face during his victorious brother's speech this afternoon simply said : "I feel sick". Sick from every angle. For himself, the party, the country, about the outcome and some of the acts, duplicity even,and behaviours which led to it. Surely the Miliband family dynamics can never be the same again and yet his younger brother was prepared to risk and accept that in order to take the coveted crown? Totally unscrupulous (old politics surely?) or just naive? From the votes of all but the unions in the Labour leadership ballot, David should have been the man on the stage, the man to take Labour on from here and further from its suffocating socialistic past.There was a real opportunity here for the party and the country but essentially old, old Labour looks as if it has blown it. Ed's rhetoric about a new generation taking over, New Labour being dead, looks uncomfortably like a swing not to the future but the emotional comfort zone of the past. It may please a hard core of older party members and traditional union chiefs but it has little to offer the young for whom he claims the new (refurbished/disguised) old is designed and even less to appeal to current Tory voters south of The Wash. Tragic. David's speech yesterday gave a lot of clues as to what his speech today would have said and sounded like and what a refreshing and revitalising power he could have been in British politics. We should all feel sick.