Last Tuesday I commented to a Labour friend that I thought the mood in the PLP and the wider party was wobbly. Ironically that same night we scored an eight per cent lead in a YouGov poll, our best result for some months.
On Wednesday we had a PMQs where Ed’s performance was under par, some fluffed questions from our own backbenchers, then a tactical screw-up regarding an opposition day debate (we tabled a general attack motion on government policy on women’s issues, which coalition MPs understandably could not support, when if we had focused on the single, specific issue of opposing plans that will make 300,000 women born between December 1953 and October 1954 wait an additional 18 months or longer to receive their state pension, a number of coalition MPs would have had to break ranks and vote with us because they had already signed an EDM on the issue).
These parliamentary events put Labour MPs in a discombobulated mood, and then a sense of crisis took hold with a series of media leaks: the release of private documents belonging to Ed Balls, apparently evidence of Brownite plotting against Blair in 2005-7 by the Telegraph; and the publication by the Guardian of the speech David Miliband would have given to conference if he had been elected leader.
Somehow all this turned into a witches’ brew that by Sunday had almost every newspaper running stories about a crisis in Ed Miliband’s leadership, and hinting at a possible coup to remove him.
I reacted to this series of events on LabourList on Monday (http://www.labourlist.org/a-period-of-silence-on-your-part-would-be-welcome).
On Monday Ed’s speech on responsibility saw him back on form, getting plaudits from the media, and articulating views on welfare reform that will have pleased party modernisers, and in my view ordinary working-class voters who feel we have failed to grapple with people they can see around them taking the system for a ride, and upset the left. This theme was reinforced by Liam Byrne’s speech that night to Progress.
Suddenly all is (relatively) calm again.
This week’s events lead me to a number of observations:
- The ‘crisis’, if that’s what it was, seems to have brought out the best in Ed, and drawn a line under a period of treading water since the 5 May elections.
- We need to stop allowing tactical setbacks to become strategic problems. Ed won’t win every PMQs encounter. Nor does any leader. We can’t afford to have a mini-crisis every time we ‘lose’ a Commons encounter. This is a four year march to the general election; no one will remember individual events like this by 2015. As we know that Ed can do well at PMQs, it follows that if he does badly in a PMQs he needs to be prepped better, not sacked!
- We have become so absorbed in our (important) strategic long-term processes of putting in place building blocks for recovery (the Refounding Labour review, the Policy Review, the thinking about ideological positioning going on around blue Labour) that we have lost focus on some of the basic tactical imperatives of opposition.
- We are still obsessed by our recent past in a way that is deeply unhealthy. So what if Ed Balls plotted against Tony Blair – this is not exactly an earth-shattering revelation! Nor is it tremendously dramatic news that David Miliband had a pretty good speech written in case he won the leadership. We can keep agonising over, micro-analysing and refighting September 2006 and September 2010 or we can accept where we are now and focus on how to win in 2015.
- Micro-analysis of exactly how New Labour or un-New Labour Ed is is also unhelpful. He needs a bit of space to develop his own distinctive identity as a leader. That and the passage of time and the way our political context and challenges have changed will inevitably mean that he isn’t going to follow the exact positioning or playbook of either of his predecessors.
Labour has got to find a way to get beyond these collective bouts of hysteria and navel-gazing.
It was heartening that we got through the immediate aftermath of the general election defeat and leadership contest calmly and in a comradely way, with none of the internal infighting, blame game or activist-driven push towards leftwing extremism that characterised the aftermath of previous defeats.
Grassroots party members have been magnificent in bouncing back straight from defeat and working their socks off to deliver over 800 extra council seats.
It is depressing that we have had period episodes of indiscipline and panic at the top level.
We haven’t all come to terms with the reality that we are in opposition, we got absolutely hammered in the general election, and it is going to be very tough to come back from defeat in just one term – something we have only ever done once in our history. There is no easy way to do this.
Along the way we won’t win every election. We won’t have the poll lead we dream off in every poll. Not every one of Ed’s speeches and PMQs performances will be flawless. Not every policy position or piece of language Ed uses will please every single person in the party.
A precondition of winning is getting real and understanding how difficult the challenge facing us is, working as a team to support Ed in addressing it, and moving on from obsessing about the divisions of the past.