On failure

Had a chat with a good friend from Germany yesterday who commiserated me on Labour’s election defeat, since she knew how much I worked for a successful outcome. When I told her that the Labour leader Ed Miliband resigned, she was like: ‘resigning has become the norm now, hasn’t it? Same here. As soon as somebody makes a mistake, they resign. What about using their experience, learn from mistakes and keep going?’

I explained to her, that in my view (and having met Ed), it would somehow go against Ed’s sense of fairness and honour to stay on after such an election result, but it made me think. A lot.

At a time when some people have appeared on TV and in the press who hadn’t had much to do with this election or elections for quite a while, but are eager to peddle to us the idea that going back to the political ideas of the election in 1997 as a quick fix because that was ‘a winner’ (yes, but in another century!), I want to look at failure. 

Does losing an election make you a loser or a total failure, such a failure that you now have to be wiped off the political map, crawl under a rock and no longer have the right to speak? 

First of all, yes, the leader takes it on the chin, but not one person can be totally responsible for it all. A party is a huge machine, there is a leadership team, there are advisors and structures that can either help or hinder the flow of ideas, there are routines and sudden occurrences, there is excitement, there are rather boring periods, there are elections and there are blind-spots. Of course, the leader leads, and a lost election is a failure, but a big failure made out of small failures all over the place. And there are also the things that went right.

My take on failure is rather based on what American friends tell me about failure: if you have never failed and fallen hard, then you have learnt nothing! I am told that American business leaders who fail badly and recover again after learning from their mistakes are more respected than those who had a plain sailing all along.

I have failed so many times in my own life, maybe not quite as spectacularly as losing an election, but certainly trying to make it as a freelancer and running a business are also areas you can fail badly. I have pulled the duvet over my face thinking I never recover and that my life is over, but these were the situations I learnt the most from. Not that I particularly wanted that experience, thank you very much, but still I haven’t given up trying, and I am certainly growing. 

It is easy to gloat from the outside, it is easy to bring in people who haven’t done much for the party in years and pay them to spout their rather unwanted wisdom, it is easy for the press to stir up the soap opera of family discord, but one fact is clear, if there is a gap at the top, vultures are circling, and although Ed said he has stepped back so that honest debate can take place, well, it’s not really honest without him, is it?

We need to learn from our mistakes, but if the main person who led us is gone, we will learn nothing and improve little. We will have a shiny new leader who may or may not have been in the previous leadership team, who shall suddenly make it all better. No, making it better is a process. After the last election defeat, there was a need to change course, and a need for a new leader because there had been a long period of discord. The party was split. This was seemingly not the case this time, the party seemed by most accounts pretty united under Ed’s leadership, and it seems that most members supported the direction it was going (ok, we weren’t exactly asked, but also didn’t leave in droves, in fact, membership increased and is still on the up). 

We all know better in hindsight, but to say defeat was a foregone conclusion is telling us, the unpaid footsoldiers who came out en mass to knock on doors weekend after weekend culminating in a 4 day gruelling slog right until the polls closed, that you sent us out while not believing we could win that battle? So we were sweatening it out, believing in the party and our party leadership’s vision with, while some of you were sharpening your knives for a new leadership contest already? If yes, we were fooled, and will certainly not forget that in a hurry. However, I don’t believe that. We thought we could win this, but we didn’t. So what now?

We all need to learn from our mistakes, but if we just change leadership and come up with new buzzwords that are endlessly repeated like ‘aspirations’ and ‘voters with aspirations’ (huh?), we might not learn anything. 

Ed made many mistakes (more than I can count on my two hands), but he also got many things right. He is a genuine, caring, sincere and witty politician. Maybe not the most spontaneous speaker, he nevertheless was willing to participate in all leadership debates that were on offer, unlike Mr Cameron who chickened out on as many as he could get away with.  He wanted as many people as possible to hear our policies. He inspired young people, he took risks and by talking to Russell Brand (like him or not) showed young people how important it is to vote and to get involved in politics. He spoke truth to power, he took vested interests on, he dared to be himself and yes, be odd at times, but show me the person who has never done anything odd, and I show you an empty suit. He was gracious under attack and showed people like me, who hate to be embarrassed in public and say the wrong thing that it is actually not a big deal. Making mistakes should also not be a big deal, you learn from them and will not repeat them. Ed never pretended to be perfect, and thus allowed us to be imperfect, too. He showed me that you can show greatness even when you don’t look ‘right’ in a society that tells us all how to look like all the time. And sadly, his defiance in how a leader should look like and speak, was never quite accepted by many people who still don’t believe you can be a leader and not look like what a leader is expected to look like. OK, that was quite a mouthful, but well, you get the jist of it, I hope.

And we call such a person a failure, weak or loser??? 

We – and not just Ed – lost an election. I still feel emotionally so bruised as if I had wrestled with a dinosaur, but I don’t consider the last months spent in the election campaign nor our policies as a total failure. We had good policies, we had a leader I (and many others) strongly believed in (or otherwise I wouldn’t have got my behind over to England and Scotland that often) and we had fantastic candidates, too. Things went wrong, but if we now roll on the floor in a collective mea culpa, go on about Red Ed or Ed the loser, Ed who we can blame everything on and get off scot free, we will just stay on the floor.

Let’s dust ourselves up, take a hard look at what went wrong in all areas we actually made mistakes and also those which may have been out of our control, and get on with it. With Ed, not without him. 

As a historian, I know how quickly things can change (which is the thing most people fear, but it happens all the time). I know that you can rise from total ‘failure’ to ‘winning’ very quickly, just look at the SNP who lost the Scottish Independence Referendum but won the elections with a landslide nine months later.

I would take Ed back as leader in a heartbeat, but he might not want that. However, we need him back at least to get his input into the debate about how to move forward. I for sure want to know what he thought went wrong, and would prefer that this happens at a large members’ meeting somewhere central where members from all over the UK can come together and slug it out – without any press presence. I don’t want my party direction dictated by the newspapers or political programmes on TV. At the same time, we need to become active and start resisting the Tory policies which are on the horizon. If we lie down now in some kind of guilty navel gazing without learning anything, now that would be failure!