Everything that everyone thinks they know about Ed Miliband is wrong.
If you think, like David Cameron sometimes pretends to believe, that he is "Red Ed", who steals off to Highgate cemetery every night to lay flowers at the grave of Karl Marx, you are wrong. You are also wrong if you think, like many of the union bosses and quite a lot of the others who backed him for the Labour leadership thought, that he is "Reddish Ed" whose goal in life is to rewind time to before Tony Blair repealed the old nationalise-everything clause IV of the party's constitution. If you thought, as Mr Miliband himself seemed to do at one foolish point, that he is "Rouge Ed", a British version of François Hollande without the scooter and the actress mistress, that is wrong too.
The way Mr Miliband actually sees himself – or, which is just as revealing, would like to be seen – is as the heir to a Republican president of the United States in the opening years of the 20th century. I know this is how he would like to be seen because I know what he gave his senior aides as a Christmas present. Being the sort of person that he is, Mr Miliband gave them a long book to read. That book is Doris Kearns Goodwin's new biography of Teddy Roosevelt. He was one of the most vivid, dynamic and charismatic characters to rule from the White House: a cowboy, a war hero, an explorer, a hunter, a governor of New York, winner of the Nobel peace prize, the inspiration for the teddy bear. He was elevated to the presidency unexpectedly when his conservative predecessor was assassinated. He is one of the four presidential greats whose visage is carved into Mount Rushmore. So the resemblances between Teddy Roosevelt and Ed Miliband may not be immediately obvious to everyone.
The reason that the Labour leader reaches back to him is two-fold. He sees a parallel between how American capitalism had become deformed during the Gilded Age and what it has become a century later in our own Age of Insecurity. In the preface to her biography, Dr Goodwin writes: "An immense gulf had opened between the rich and the poor; daily existence had become more difficult for ordinary people, and the middle class felt increasingly squeezed." The idea of "the squeezed middle" is not so new. The radical Republican president took on the infamous robber barons of early 20th-century American capitalism by challenging and breaking up their corporate cartels. Roosevelt was not against capitalism. He was a Republican, after all. His ambition was to fix capitalism, to reform it to make it better serve more Americans. He wanted to make capitalism popular again. Ed Miliband: popular capitalist? Is that really how he wants to be seen? Yes it is, according to those who helped him write his important speech on reforming the banks. Capping how much market share any one of them can control and creating new competitors on the high street should not be seen as anti-business, I was told, but the reverse. "It shows that we are the pro-competition, pro-markets party."
In his own eyes, a Miliband premiership would be about breaking up concentrations of power and wealth, just as Roosevelt attacked the vested interests of his age. All politicians write narratives of themselves to try to impose a logical order on the often chaotic and haphazard way in which they and their positions develop. In Mr Miliband's mind, the consistent and binding theme of his leadership has been challenging "predators", the description for the overpowerful that he used in his first conference speech as Labour leader. First, it was Rupert Murdoch. Then came the "big six" energy companies, payday lenders and the gambling industry. Now, he fixes his sights on the "big five" banks. Coming next, maybe, the trade union leaders.
The second thing this speech wanted to do was more tactical. It is widely expected that this year many voters will finally start to receive wage rises in excess of inflation. The Tories are betting on this to take the air out of the Labour leader's constant mantra about "the cost of living crisis". The speech endeavoured to pre-empt that development by arguing that, even if people do feel somewhat better off, the "deeper" structural unfairnesses of the economy mean that prosperity will not be as great as it could be and nor will its fruits be fairly shared. Finally, he hoped to make a big splash similar to the hit he achieved with his party conference speech pledging to freeze energy bills. If he didn't hope for that, he should not have allowed such large expectations to build up in advance of this latest speech.
Things have not gone entirely to plan. "A bumpy ride" is how one of the Miliband team describes the run-up to and reception for this speech. The governor of the Bank of England, who fell into the trap of answering a leading question from a Tory MP based on not wholly accurate leaks to the newspapers, stuck a Canadian spoke in the wheels by reacting negatively to Mr Miliband's proposals even before the Labour leader had revealed them. Labour people are cross with the governor – some of them very cross indeed – for straying into party political territory. The phrase "Osborne's stooge" is thrown about.
Chuka Umunna, the shadow business secretary, expressed some public irritation when he chided Mark Carney for getting involved in "big political debates". But both Ed Miliband and Ed Balls have kept a lid on any fury that they may feel. They judge that a full-on public row between Labour and the bank governor would not be in the party's interests.
The speech was also disrupted by George Osborne's distraction tactic of announcing the Tory party's conversion to a big, catch-up increase in the minimum wage to return its inflation-adjusted value to what it was in 2008. This has been brewing for months, but was the timing of the announcement coincidental? You bet it was not. In fact, David Cameron had planned to reveal that volte-face at prime minister's questions the day before. He only did not because, contrary to his expectations, no one on the Labour side raised the issue.
Labour has also been taken somewhat by surprise by how their opponents have reacted to the banking proposals. When the energy bill freeze was unveiled, the Tory leader initially reacted by calling it "Marxist" and "nuts" before getting into a panic about its popularity and telling George Osborne that they had to come up with their own counter-version. That made them look silly and helped Mr Miliband project himself as the agenda-setter. This time they have responded with more sophistication by arguing that, where his ideas have merit, they are irrelevant because the government is already fostering the creation of new challengers to the big banks. "He won't get any bite in this area," shrugs one Treasury official. "We're doing this stuff anyway."
What Mr Miliband has to say about the condition of early 21st-century capitalism will resonate with many. "Higher personal debt. Uneven growth. Low investment. Insecure jobs. House prices out of reach. Bills still too high. Banks not serving the wealth-creators."
That strikes a chord. He is also completely correct when he says: "Britain has one of the most concentrated banking systems in the world", in which just four banks control 85% of lending to small businesses. But opinion remains as divided as ever within his party about whether this approach can be turned into electoral dividends.
His friends argue that his prospectus for a "new capitalism" ought to be a winner. Most British voters still believe in the free market, but they also agree it needs reform. "It is a majoritarian position,"argues one of those who helped write the speech. Sceptics within Labour's ranks continue to fear that promising a "new capitalism" is too abstract to sell on the doorsteps and it will be trumped by the simpler Tory message that recovery is underway and Labour will wreck it. Mr Miliband did mention the deficit, but only in passing and without adding any detail about how a Labour government would clear it. Says one senior Labour figure: "Before people will trust us to reform capitalism they first have to trust us with the economy." Ed Balls is scheduled to make a speech this week, also billed as very important, on how Labour would be fiscally disciplined. The lack of content about that in Mr Miliband's speech increases the pressure on the shadow chancellor to deliver more clarity.
If the Labour leader truly wants to emulate Teddy Roosevelt, he also needs to learn from the communication skills of the man who coined the phrase the "Bully Pulpit" to describe the rhetorical power of the presidency. While accomplished at coming up with phrases to describe what is wrong with Britain, Mr Miliband still struggles to find accessible language to convey how he would put it right. "One Nation" is ultimately vapid. There was one reasonable zinger in his latest speech: "Under a Labour government, you will no longer be serving the banks. The banks will be serving you." He needs more lines like that. It is one thing to read a book about Teddy Roosevelt. Bringing him back to life in the person of Ed Miliband, that's quite another.
