I picked somebody up off her bike after she crashed, and she told me I was an action hero. Insisted I wasn’t at all geeky, even if she was a bit dazed at the time. I’m not funny! Last month I found it hard to oppose making war on Syria, but I did it. When I first sought election as MP for Doncaster, I sat down to tea with a local Labour activist called Molly, and I was asked how I could possibly know anything about the lives of the people living in that constituency; still less represent them. Because I learned my values from my mother, I said. I didn’t have it easy when I was elected Labour leader, because there were repercussions for my family. Recently I have been campaigning again, standing on my pallet – mine is a pallet not a soapbox. Standing on my pallet I have answered questions from all sorts of people – angry people, hard-pressed people. I went into politics to help these people. And now I’ve come off the conference stage to find my late father’s name defamed. I repeat, I learned my values from my parents. They taught me to understand I was brought into the world to help people, OK?

No, Ed Miliband stopped short of claiming apostolic mission.  But only by a few syllables.  Sure wasn’t shy about personal influences and individual characteristics: I-this, I-that, I-and-the-other. Me and my mother. So much I-contact you’d be forgiven for thinking that the leader’s speech to party conference was less of a manifesto of what he (third person singular) could do for us (first person plural); more like a further exercise in validating, verifying, volumising the first-person.

Bigging Up Ed (again) only makes him a Big ‘Ead.

(Of course, that’s not what I intended. Not at all what I meant. I really did not mean to give that impression. I have been misinterpreted. I insist that the record must be set straight. I….etc etc.) read more