AHC: Make David Miliband Leader of the Liberal Democrats

With a POD on or after 2010, your challenge is to make David Miliband the leader of the Liberal Democrats. Bonus points if you can engineer a David vs. Ed vs David showdown.
 
For a start, I doubt the Lib Dems would have him, and I also doubt very much that he would be so consumed with vengeful feelings that he would stay in Parliamentary politics, trying to distract from and destroy his own brother's career. Yes, of course he was petty - a bad loser - but he was much more the sort to never show his face in Britain again than to... I dunno, take tips from Scar off the Lion King?

But let's imagine he's so pissed off in 2010, after a nastier leadership campaign, that he defects to the Lib Dems, and for some reason they ignore the fact that he's clearly just gone a bit crazy with jealousy and would therefore not be an asset to the Party or the Government, and they welcome him. He probably gets into Cabinet off the bat, as a major propaganda coup against Ed's leadership - and this would obviously be displacing a Tory or Lib Dem who's put in the hard yards in Opposition to rise to the Cabinet, so there's immediate frostiness from his new colleagues. That goes without saying.

But the immediate problem with David becoming Lib Dem Leader, even in a situation where Clegg steps down during the 2010-15 Parliament, is that he's in no position to retain his seat after a defection. In ordinary circumstances, no Party wants a Leader who could bring the Party into disrepute by losing his own seat. Now, in 2010, the LDs came third in South Shields with 14% of the vote, and the last time they'd had more than 20% was in 1983. So there's no chance of him retaining in 2015. Potentially he could be parachuted to a safe Liberal Democrat seat - oh, wait, yeah, that's not a thing. So the only time he could become Leader is pre-2015, and I don't think the Lib Dems would axe Clegg unless he was caught in a Jeremy Thorpe situation.
 

GarethC

Donor
There is a Radio 4 comedy programme called Listen Against which mashes up news headlines with filler read by somebody from Today like... (googles) Alice Arnold. Sometimes it's funny.

When Miliband was in cabinet, their epithet for him every segment was something like "Once again, Foreign Secretary David Miliband went a bit special when..." and this OP made that instantly leap to mind.

Anyway, say Miliband joins Hewitt and Hoon's call for a secret ballot on Brown's leadership in January 2010. Afterwards, Gordon puts in motion the deselection of Miliband, so the latter defects before the 2010 election... and holds his seat through a miracle of personal loyalty from his constituents due to the sheer magnetism of his personality, the unbridled passion of his rhetoric, and the raw animalism of his sex appeal.*

Then let Miliband be vocally-critical of Clegg over tuition fees. The timing's not great - the Lib Dem conference in 2010 is in September, the Browne report comes out in October and the Commons vote is in December. But that puts him back into the spotlight as a Lib-Dem lefty, rather than a Labour centrist.

Then let him have paid more attention to Lord Macchia -ahem - I mean Mandelson and put together a sustained criticism of Clegg after the AV referendum defeat. I'm not totally clear on the Lib Dem party rules here - if he can get five signatures he can stand for leader, but what triggers the leadership contest in the first place? Does he need a majority of the LibDem MPs to back a motion of no confidence first? That's pretty tough, I think.

Then he's got to have more spine than he showed in never actually sticking his cock on the block against Brown, and break the coalition - the excuse can be AV, or Trident, or Lords reform, or any of it, but he's got to arrange a no-confidence vote in Parliament (or whatever the process is nowadays under the fixed-term act) and three-line whip the Lib-Dems into voting against Cameron. "Cameron didn't give enough to Nick to let Nick continue to command the loyalty of our party, and so Cameron can no longer have Nick's coalition" or something like that.

The Lib Dems leave government blaming the Tories every day until election day, maybe letting them continue on a confidence and supply basis. Gets pretty speculative here I'm afraid.

If his courage means he can retain his seat in 2015, then he might have a chance to be in a coalition with his brother, depending on the butterflies. That would be... tense, methinks.

*This is honestly the most unlikely phrase I have ever written on this site, even including all the ASB forum posts about Harry Potter, Tolkien, and A Song of Ice and Fire.
 
The Lib Dems are not Blairites. In fact they opposed Blairism more than the Tories did, and more effectively than the Labour left.

If Labour winds up splitting, the Blairite wing is going to find that out. Really, their best option is to convince Blair himself to come back into the game.

If you want to get either Milliband as a Lib Dem leader, the best POD is to make Ralph Milliband not a Marxist, but a left leaning intellectual with a libertarian bent. The family is then Liberal, and the brothers naturally join the Liberals. Even then they have to find some way of getting elected to Parliament -never easy for Lib Dem pols- and to win over the party's activists. And everyone knows that really ambitious politicians don't join the Liberals or Lib Dems, you join the Tories or maybe Labour, as a Lib Dem the most power you can hold is as a local council leader (the Lib Dem ministers were a once in a century event). I can see Ed taking this route, but for David you would need a complete personality transplant.
 
The Lib Dems are not Blairites.

Wut? Under Clegg they pretty much were more or less that, they certainly had a superior claim in some ways to that mantle than Cameron. Though equally, DM would be pretty acceptable to the Lib Dem left, policy-wise he's perfectly compatible with them, that's not really the issue here. And having Ralph Milliband as a Liberal is hardly a guarantee of anything politically when it comes to his sons considering, uh, neither of them are Marxists IOTL and Blair in any case went out of his way to court Lib Dems (and indeed Tories) like Andrew Adonis in his early time as leader particularly. Politics isn't hereditary.

I think you would need an ur-POD for this, I think people are thinking in too contemporary terms. You probably wouldn't get an exact Lib Dems* as a result, but if you make the Alliance more successful in the eighties and Labour on the left for longer, under either a Benn or, more likely, a Meacher leadership, (or some combination of) that might be enough to turn his head during some of what seem to have been his formative years as an emerging moderniser in the late eighties*. That could very easily set up two brothers leading different parties. He's just not going to defect to the Lib Dems as a mature, elected Labour politician. It's just not happening. I mean, it's not exactly like anyone can even say 'Hay guys the Campaign Group takes over and we get SDPII' anymore. Happened and not happening. Or at least, if the latter does in the future, it will be well outside David Miliband's political expiration date.

*Don't really like indulging in PODs/commentary which is too tasteless or morbid, but Ralph was on direct personal terms with a lot of figures such as these on the left, so an earlier demise for Miliband senior (IOTL he died of heart disease in 1994) would probably expedite DM finding his own way politically in a world of the SDP at least partially 'breaking the mould' and Labour languishing in the doldrums.
 
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With the restrictions on the POD, you may as well place this thread in ASB because that is the only way that this is happening.
 
Wut? Under Clegg they pretty much were more or less that, they certainly had a superior claim in some ways to that mantle than Cameron. Though equally, DM would be pretty acceptable to the Lib Dem left, policy-wise he's perfectly compatible with them, that's not really the issue here.
Both were centrist, but that is more a position on the political spectrum than a specific ideology. The Lib Dems generally see Blair and his associates as too statist on civil liberties, in particular. They are also less hawkish (being more open to nuclear disarmament) far more interested in political reform, and in some respects, more economically interventionist. They advocated Labour regulate the banks better, and I get the sense that even Clegg was more in favour of progressive taxation than Blair, as he kept the Tories from scrapping the 50p tax rate for the first few years in the coalition, and succeeded in negotiating it up to 45p rather than 40p, that Blair had and Osborne suggest reinstating. Miliband would not be particularly left wing for a Lib Dem, but he would be a bit out of place in the party given how he doesn't agree with them on some of their defining principles.
 
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