THE NEARLY MAN - AND WHY I'M GLAD HE LOST

Today I am back at work after a few days at Labour Party Conference and few days battling a seriously vile sore throat and chest infection. There was a lot of it around in Manchester......with various speakers and politicians losing their voices.
I bailed out early Tuesday morning but hotfooted it home to catch the Leader's Speech live at 2,30pm. What to make of it all. ..
In the two days since there has been ad nauseam footage of the Miliband drama. While in Europe workers take to the streets and set fire to vehicles in protest at the cuts., here journalists comment on David Miliband's Paul Smith shirt and obsess on the brotherly psycho-drama
On my return to the office this morning, otherwise sane people were nodding sagely and warning that Labour was on its way back to the 1980's.
As Ed Miliband himself might say, come off it !
Labour's new Leader is mildly left of centre yet even this is too much for a media so used to neo-liberal New Labour that they are hurling bile and venom in a way not seen since the Kinnock years. A timely reminder that even pale pink social democracy is too much for the establishment.
But Labour simply cannot allow the howls of anguish to send the Party back on a right trajectory.
The Blairites are causing mischief enough and doing all they can to undermine Ed Miliband without us on the left piling in and heaping coals before we know who is in the Cabinet and what policies are likely to emerge in the coming months.
We know it won't be an agenda of mass mobilisation against the cuts, we know the "Red Ed" tag is a nonsense.
But we should also recognise that we have a job to do and we are in a beter place to do it than for a long time.
Nearly 40,000 people have joined the Labour Party since May and that for many a left agenda is awhat they are seeking and what they perceive the Labour Party to now be returning to. The fact they are actually wronmg does not mean we can't put the pressure on from below to make it so
The famously sentimental Neil Kinnock apparently roared with glee that "We've got out Party back" at the first Tribune rally for aeons . It was, to say the least of it, over-egging the pudding.
But the rejection of Blair's heir must be a positive for the grassroots - and a cause for cautious optimism.