Ed’s just so rock and roll

The Labour Party’s finest are pock-marked with the scars of encounters between themselves and rock stars. All too keen to demonstrate their kudos-enhancing ‘common touch’,

Labour’s leaders have sometimes shamelessly dragged unsuspecting music celebs into their orbit to coat their dreary world of Westminster with the glitzy stardust of showbiz.

Problem is, they have often emerged from such encounters looking awkward, distant from the public or just plain embarrassed. Tony Blair’s infamous ‘cool Britannia’ Number 10 invite to Oasis skipper, Noel Gallagher, in 1997 is a case in point. John Prescott’s riotous 1998 Brit Awards run-in with anarcho-punks Chumbawamba an even better example.

Trumping the music industry’s finest has never been easy for the political class. And so Diary looked on, only half-anxiously, when Labour leader, Ed Miliband, opened his Q&A session at the Local Government Association conference in Birmingham last week with a question from an audience member who identified himself as ‘Chuck Berry’.

Following a long critique of Labour’s approach to local government by somebody I took to be the 1950s guitar legend – he certainly looked old enough, possibly the wrong ethnicity, in retrospect, though… – Diary half-expected the under-fire younger ‘Milibland’ to either get all starry-eyed like Blair, or to simply wilt under pressure, Prescott-style.

All credit, then, to young Ed when he fired back at the criticism with a genuinely-funny line. ‘I preferred your earlier stuff, Chuck,’ he beamed, before launching into a vision for a better world ominously devoid of policy content.

Even Chuck – who, it turned out, is a Tory councillor at Wiltshire CC and not a guitar rock pioneer – saw the funny side.