The sight of Pitt The Very Very Younger UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband snapping to to stand shoulder to shoulder with the incompetent and clueless (but much more experienced in ratfuckery) Condoleeza Rice over Turkey and Iraq fills me with foreboding, given the potential for a slide into regional war – which could then provide another pretext (if the others don’t work out) for a US nuclear attack on Iran.
Before this the boy wonder Miliband’s experience at high-level international diplomacy was a brief stint as environment secretary.
But the thing is, he’s young, or rather he has a youthful demeanour, and this government is all about the youth, baby, so much so that several cabinet and senior New Labour figures appear to have had makeovers recently, not least Gordon Brown himself.
Ruth Kelly was sporting a softer haircut and actual makeup on Questiion Time recently (does Opus Dei allow makeup?) Jack Straw got contacts and sleek new hair, Brown has had teeth and hair fixed and new suits in softer colours. Hazel Blears is a walking botox ad.
As boomers they fear encroaching age and know the culture of youth they have helped perpetuate will bite them on the ass if they don’t keep up, as it did Menzies Campbell, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, who was ousted as much for his lack of youthful charisma as much as if not more than for his policies. The new candidates for Lib Dem leader are virtually identikit, white, middle-youth, middle-class Miliband-a-likes and Cameron is a pink-faced public schoolboy.
The Brown government and Labour can’t afford Ming’s fate so they are desperately promoting the inexperienced young policy wonks who’ve never had a proper job, like Miliband and his brother Ed and others, to disguise the fact that this government, after ten years of screwing over the electorate, is old, tired and jaded.
But there are situations when a bit of gravitas and age-acquired wisdom and cunning are required and those Miliband has not got, for all his shiny teeth and hair.
Call it ageism if you like but to me he looks and sounds not only smugly naive but pliable and altogether too impressed with where and who he is. A volatile situation in a region where ancient enmities that could go oiff pop with the slightest provocation is not the time for an ambitious political protege, however well-connected, to be doing on the job training.
