Did David Miliband lose because he was too old and experienced?

A killer line from Ronald Reagan, then aged 73, in one of the 1984 TV debates with Walter Mondale (56) came when he said that he was not going to exploit for political purposes his opponent's youth and inexperience (HERE).

The joke served him well, but wouldn't work at all in the UK today - where increasing youthfulness and inexperience has been steadily becoming the norm among our leaders since Harold Wilson became Prime Minister at the tender age of 48 - as can be seen from the following two tables.

Table 1: Age and experience of current UK main party leaders

	Age on becoming leader	Years as an MP before becoming leader
Miliband Cameron Clegg	40 41 38	5 4 2

Table 2: Age and experience of Prime Ministers since Wilson

	Age on becoming leader	Years as an MP on beoming leader
Callaghan Brown Wilson Thatcher Heath Major Blair	64 56 47 50 49 47 41	29 24 18 17 15 14 11

'The torch has passed'?

Having heard Ed Miliband repeatedly reminding us that the Labour Party has passed to 'a new generation', I've been half-expecting him to go the whole hog and recycle the rest of a famous line from John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech about the torch having been passed to a younger generation.

But I don't think he will, because Kennedy wasn't just talking about youthfulness, but about what his generation had experienced:

"the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans - born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace ... "

For our current party leaders, the risk of evoking Kennedy is that the experience of active service in a world war contrasts rather too obviously with the that of 'being tempered by spending pretty much the whole of your adult life working for and as professional politicians'.

Or has the candle gone out?

When Anthony Eden (aged 58) took over from Winston Churchill (aged 81) as leader of the Conservative Party in 1955, my late mother-in-law considered him "far too young and inexperienced for the job of Prime Minister."

A bit extreme by today's standards, perhaps, but I can't help wondering if we've reached a point where the risk of being led into the next general election by someone as ancient as 50 may have played a part in Labour's rejection of David Miliband in favour of his younger brother.

Ed Miliband "gets it" in his bid to bond with the brethren

A problem for Oxford-educated Labour leaders is how to bond with the masses in general and the core vote in particular.

Harold Wilson did it by retaining enough traces of a Yorkshire accent to sound like 'one of them'.

In interviews and chat shows, Tony Blair occasionally (and rather unconvincingly) lapsed into 'Estuary English', inserting glottal stops at points where he would more usually have used a perfectly enunciated 't' sound.

Glo'al stops in Donny?
Having spent five years at school in Doncaster, I've often wondered how the town's most famous MP, having been parachuted into a safe seat by the Labour Party high command, was managing to get along with the locals.

One thing I'd already noticed was that Ed Miliband seems even keener than Tony Blair on glottle stops. You'll hear quite a few of them in this clip, even though they're quite alien to the regional accent in that part of South Yorkshire - where the sound is typically heard as proof that the speaker must be 'a bloody Southerner.'

"I get it..."
In yesterday's leadership acceptance speech (which can be seen in full HERE), another ploy was on show with the repetitive use of contemporary youthful jargon, in which the verb "to get" is preferred to more traditional verbs like to understand, to know or to appreciate - six times in a row in this particular sequence.

Now that Mr Miliband has got it (by which I mean, in case there's any ambiguity, the leadership of the Labour Party), it will be interesting to see whether he's got any more such folksy devices up his sleeve as he bids to bond with the broader masses.

Also of possible interest:

• Ed Miliband victory greeted with apathy in Doncaster North
• Vowels, voters and the voice of authenticity: the leadership case for Andy Burnham
• Labour leadership: Mirror on the wall, who's the most bourgeois of us all?

Labour Party leaders' acceptance speeches: Neil Kinnock, 1983; Ed Miliband, 2010

With the winner of the Labour Party leadership election to be announced over the weekend, the Miliband brothers and their speechwriters must be hard at work on the acceptance speech.

As they were children when Neil Kinnock was elected party leader in 1983, they may not have paid much attention to what was widely regarded at the time as a minor classic.

So to inspire them in their efforts, and allow others among us to wallow in nostalgia, here it is.

Introduced by the chair as a "wee, wee speech if it's possible" (!), it takes him about 2-3 minutes to get up a decent head of steam - but, after that, it's well worth watching:

Kinnock Part I (about 6 minutes):

Kinnock Part II (about 7 minutes):

P.S. Miliband's Acceptance Speech, (starts 2 minutes in) 2010:

You can now compare Neil Kinnock's effort directly with that of the new leader. A first impression that rather surprised me after a couple of viewings was that, compared with his mentor's speech, Miliband's script seemed a bit lacking in substance.