The new Clement Attlee?

David Blunkett was on Today this morning talking about the state of the Labour Party, and he suggested that Ed Miliband's uncharismatic placidity was reminiscent of Clement Attlee. It's a comparison that has been made by others - most notably by Ken Livingstone - and it's easy to see the appeal of such a claim. But does it hold water?

To start with, there are difference of experience between the two men.

Attlee had been an MP for 23 years by the time he got to be prime minister; assuming Miliband wins the next election (which I've never believed), he'll have been an MP for just ten. Attlee had served in the governments of Ramsay MacDonald in the 1920s and '30s, and been deputy prime minister for three years under Winston Churchill; Miliband had less than two years as secretary for energy and climate change under Gordon Brown.

If one were being cruel, one might also add that Attlee saw active service - and was wounded - in the First World War, at an age when Miliband was the junior member of Gordon Brown's inner circle.

But the crucial difference is surely that Attlee was surrounded by a team of big hitters. Miliband can hardly claim the same. Here are perhaps the key members of Attlee's government in 1945, with their modern Labour front-bench counterparts in brackets afterwards:

Chancellor: Hugh Dalton (Ed Balls)
Foreign affairs: Ernest Bevin (Douglas Alexander)
Home affairs: James Chuter Ede (Yvette Cooper)
Health: Aneurin Bevan (Andy Burnham)
Education: Ellen Wilkinson (Stephen Twigg)
Trade: Stafford Cripps (Chuka Umunna)
Commons leader: Herbert Morrison (Angela Eagle)
Fuel and power: Manny Shinwell (Caroline Flint)
Lord chancellor: William Jowitt (Sadiq Khan)

If you were drawing up a dream team from members of Attlee's cabinet and Miliband's shadow cabinet, how many of the latter would you include?