Ed Miliband’s in trouble. The victim of a leadership election that made him head of a party
whose MPs voted for someone else, the centre of a fratricidal tragedy with Shakespearean
potential (they voted for his brother), and leader of the Opposition in a time when the key
debate is about how not to spend money. He came home for Christmas, found the Student
Loan’s run out, and watched his big brother get all the family’s attention. New Year didn’t
bring much fun either. A veritable lynch mob of Labour figures lined up to articulate in their
own words exactly where he was going wrong. But this wasn’t just a parade of the disowned
and disgruntled with their own axes to grind. There was a common and worrying theme; a
cry famously used against John Major by the last electorally successful Labour leader, Tony
Blair: weak, weak, weak!
“He has flickered rather than shone, nudged not led” – Lord Glasman, Labour Peer and ‘policy guru’
Leadership was always going to be tricky for Ed. Lacking the support of his own MPs he’s
had to make some serious concessions to stay in control. In his desire to avoid the true ‘son
of Brown’, Ed Balls, the other Ed decided to appoint Alan Johnson as his first Shadow
Chancellor. By his own admission, Johnson was clearly unsuited to the role and left at the
first available opportunity. Too weak to decline a second time, Ed M. had to give Ed B. the
role and Yvette Cooper Shadow Home Secretary, giving Mr. and Mrs. Balls the plum pair of
jobs around the Shadow Cabinet table. Having leadership rivals so close would be bad news
alone, forgetting the fact that Ed Ball’s association with the Blair/Brown era could come to be
one of the biggest problems for any future Labour Party.
In Opposition, Labour has failed to make the opinion poll gains that might be expected given the country’s economic situation, division within government and the time in the Parliamentary cycle. A key reason often given for this in opinion polls is that would-be voters still blame the previous administration for the current economic situation. The question of whether Mr. Balls is right or wrong now continues to be asked through the lens of his link to the past. A past in which Mr. E Miliband also had a ministerial association. But there is hope.
Unwanted at the top of the table he may be, but Ed did manage to re-write party rules meaning he can appoint his own shadow cabinet, rather than have it voted in by the Parliamentary Party, something his predecessors were always denied. Equally, a kind observer would write-off the full fifteen months it took to appoint a new chief of staff as a way of ensuring the best candidate, not the long list of people who turned down the post. The one person Ed knew didn’t have a job at the time (brother David) was quite possibly busy plotting the his downfall; there are plenty in the party that would support it, with him as successor.
“Ed Ball’s highly pertinent arguments…are being drowned out in the public’s mind by his leader’s
misguided anti-business rhetoric.” – Tim Allan, former advisor to Tony Blair
Ed also struggles to look and sound like the leader he needs to be. Often portrayed as Wallace
(at least he’s not Gromit), Ed Miliband doesn’t seem to be able to set himself up as the future
Prime Minister. Instead, he can fall into a complaining, even whingeing, tone, especially
in the House of Commons. Analysing events with the tone of a frustrated outsider, and
aligning yourself with the proverbial ‘man on the street’ (or as Ed’s more probably aiming
for ‘squeezed middle in the suburb’) can be an admirable and, if done well, extremely potent
way of defining policy. Get it wrong and you’re the interrupting younger brother all over
again.
When he sets the agenda, rather than criticising it, success does come. Ed is one of few
to be thankful for the phone hacking scandal that closed a successful national newspaper and continues to rock one of the world’s biggest media empires. A fast reacting Ed’s dealing with
the issue, including calling for a public enquiry, managed to gauge the public mood perfectly,
making many in Westminster, especially the Prime Minister, look ‘on the back foot’.
“We cannot get to 2015 and an election with the public and the media asking the question: ‘Who is Ed Miliband?’” — Alan Johnson, Former Labour Cabinet Minister
Public polls bring mixed messages for Ed. If he’s looking to appear centralist (and he mostly
claims he is) then the YouGov Spectrum Poll of October might not be too welcome reading.
On a scale of minus 100 (very left wing) to plus 100 (very right wing), it gives him a score
of minus 42 (at the 2005 general election Tony Blair stood at plus 7). His personal approval
ratings have also been criticised, plummeting to minus 32 at the last count by YouGov (9th
Jan), compared to David Cameron’s score of plus 13 at a similar time in the same post.
But despite this it hasn’t been all bad news for Labour under Ed. They’ve won (or, rather,
held onto) five by-elections since he became leader, for example, and gained eight hundred
councillors.
‘Ed Miliband has sensibly given himself the space to develop policy. The question is now what he
puts into that space.” Tony Blair
But the Labour position on a number of issues remains vague: cuts are required, but not too
fast, and where isn’t hugely obvious either. It is up to the leader to shape this message for the
public. Perhaps the real concern for Ed Miliband in 2012, however, isn’t so much how he’s
saying things, but what it is that he wants to say. On his election to leader he was quick to try
and ditch the ‘Red Ed’ label, assigned partly as a result of him winning on the back of union
votes. As the New Labour movement showed in 1997, and subsequently, this is essential
to winning Downing Street. The Labour party simply cannot be seen to be definitely left
wing.
As Tony Blair recently pointed out, Ed needs to ‘fight from the centre’; that’s where
the swing votes (and many of them) lie. To his credit, Ed did make a start on this with the
beginning of his crusade for what he calls the ‘squeezed middle’: ‘Word of the Year’ (surely
words?) in 2011 by the Oxford English Dictionary, no less. These are the people who’s votes
all political parties are fighting for; those who work hard but do continually find it more
difficult to live as well as they have done in the past. Many also fall into the ‘aspirational
middle and working class’ that was so successfully targeted by Tony Blair and Margret
Thatcher. But they are not interested in the complex and almost philosophical argument about
good and bad capitalism. And they are suspicious of greater government intervention (Ed
wants to target ‘vested interests’ such as the big energy companies).
Ed Miliband’s public demands a clearer narrative about what he stands for and, most importantly, a direct pathway to how it will deliver them jobs, security and the increased standard of living their parents had come to expect. He also needs a better image. As William Hague proved, however
good your brain and politics, people’s perceptions are shallow. If you don’t give a first impression of being Prime Minister, you probably won’t be.
