[Chris O'Carroll]

No 4239
Set by Adair R Fyn
The New Statesman publishedan article earlier this month on Ed Miliband (“His story could keep a psychologist busy for years”) and asked the question: What is Milibandism? We asked for the views of an extreme Milibandist to make the matter clear.

This week’s winners
First, two service announcements. Two compers have emailed to say they also sent in “One with the Wind” as an entry into No 4237, for which two other compers were awarded with hon menshes. But NOT them. My apologies. Stephen de Winton and Fred MacLean, you also can have an hon mensh. This week, you surpassed yourselves. The winners
can have £25 each, with the Tesco vouchers going, in addition, to Adrian Fry.

Moving heaven and earth
Good question. It means never having to say yes-sirree. It means moving heaven and earth to get to what’s in between them – not the middle but definitely not the crust. It means questioning answers without answering questions, asking the right people not the wrong people, and making sure there’s a vacant chair at the top table anyone to occupy. It means finger-painting not finger-pointing: happiness is a free prescription for everyone. It means keeping your finger on the impulse. It means incremental arithmetic: adding and subtracting, dividing and going forth and multiplying the options available. It’s about sorting out what’s in the national wardrobe and making sure it shouldn’t be in the loft or the charity shop. It’s hip as in replacement, and cool as in “Birth of the”. It’s what every child loves: plasticine.
All the colours.
Bill Greenwell

Fed up with policies
People are fed up with politics.And they’re fed up withpoliticians. So it goes without saying that they’re fed up with policies.
That’s what’s really radical about Ed Miliband. He’s not going to have any policies. Instead, he’ll have attitudes; people can relate to attitudes.
He will definitely have a very strong attitude towards the Tory party: he’s
against it and he doesn’t care who knows it.
He’s also got an attitude towards Tony Blair and it’s a pretty powerful one: “I’m not Tony Blair. I shall never be Tony Blair. I don’t even look like Tony Blair.”
That’s certainly an attitude people can relate to, isn’t it?
But just to leave no doubt about his total commitment to this attitude, he’s absolutely determined that nothing he does will ever remind people of Blair – like winning a general election.
Brian Allgar

Nothing in, nothing out
Milibandists refute decisions made by ConDems, Brownites and Davidian Milibandist heretics alike, ruling all of them wrong but never ruling any of them out. Except the Davidians. Not that we concern ourselves much with those wrongheaded pig-dog Davidians. Our contemplation of power seldom includes our detailed plans perpetually to exclude them from it. We believe – unlike the Davidians, to give but one example – in keeping all policies at the contemplation stage, where they are – unlike those set-in-stone Davidian Plan B’s – richly possible. Ed – as different from David as either Coen brother from the other – disregards left and right, aims our movement not just for the centre of the centre but for the centre of that. There, in the vortex where policy flux energises activity stasis, Ed sees a limitless void in which our Great Procrastination can continue for ever, Davidians notwithstanding.
Adrian Fry

Psychological features
Milibandism, or Miliband Syndrome, is a congenital condition with physical and psychological features. The precise link between the dysmorphic physical features and personality traits is unclear. The extreme Milibandist – almost always an only child – displays a multiple personality disorder, imagining a sibling rivalry with a more successful, albeit non-existent sibling, or siblings.
The term originated in medieval Belgium, where a feral child was discovered who imagined he had one thousand siblings with whom he was closely bonded (hence “à mille bondé”). The fact that the subject is never found in the same room as any of his imagined siblings does not seem to reduce the delusion of intense rivalry. Subjects have been known to stand against each other for election and even to edit magazines in their alter ego’s name.
David Silverman

Adrian Fry takes the Tesco vouchers, while Bill Greenwell and Brian Allger are also winners.