In the last couple of weeks we’ve had an outbreak of panic on Twitter and blogs caused by one good joke by David Cameron at PMQs (unlikely to be remembered by any voters by 2015)  and an uptick in the Tory poll numbers following Cameron’s ‘veto’ at the EU summit.

The polls need looking at in a bit of detail:

YouGov, the only pollster to publish a daily tracker poll, did put the Tories narrowly ahead between 13 and 15 December. On 16 December Labour retook a three per cent lead, rising to four per cent on 19 December. In fact, the 42 per cent we are now on is identical to the 42 per cent we were on a month ago on 30 November. Yes that’s correct: Labour is on the same rating now it was three weeks ago. Unchanged.

Forty-two per cent is the kind of score that in a general election delivered Blair two landslides and Thatcher her three wins. The highest we have managed since the general election is 45 per cent.

Our core vote, we know from the nadir of our fortunes in June 2009, is only 21 per cent.

So since that low point our support has exactly doubled, and since the general election it is up 13 per cent from 29 per cent.

We are even running seven per cent higher, and with a one per cent higher lead, than the score that we got when we won the 2005 general election.

The blip that saw the Tories take the lead for three days was not caused by a significant drop in our support – the lowest we hit was 38 per cent – but by a switch from minor parties (presumably UKIP) to Tory.

There are many things Ed Miliband can control but the relative balance between UKIP and the Tories is not one of them.

Colleagues also need to get real about the difficult situation we are in as a party following the 2010 general election defeat.

We are trying to recover from our second-worst drubbing in percentage vote terms since 1918. Last time we got beaten this badly, it was nearly a decade and a half before we won back power.

The financial crisis means we have lost our reputation for economic competence. Voters have currently bought into the Tory narrative that we overspent, even though high government spending was a response to try to grow us out of the recession not its cause.

We have a problem of personnel in that, while we have a talented group of young politicians coming through, our long years in government physically and politically burnt out the generation above them, so we are lacking in experienced, or widely publicly recognised, grey-haired senior figures still on the frontbench.

We have a problem with Scotland where our new leader has to pull us back from a crushing defeat in a traditional heartland.

We have a problem with our union affiliates in that they are being dragged by their activists in the opposite direction to the electorate. Those of us on the right of the party can help address that by seriously applying ourselves to winning back the unions for moderate policies and leaders.

We have a tactical problem whenever Europe is raised in that the electorate is now in a deeply anti-EU place and as internationalists and rational social democrats we can’t and shouldn’t try to join a bidding war with UKIP and the Tory right. Luckily Europe also exposes divisions within the Tory party and between them and the Lib Dems, and isn’t usually the most resonant issue when people decide which way to vote.

Underlying these short-term problems is the Labour party’s long-term demographic time bomb, which was hidden but still ticking during the Blair years. The geographical areas and socioeconomic groups that form Labour’s base are in long-term decline due to deindustrialisation, reduced class identification, falling union membership, decreasing levels of social housing, and population movement from the north and urban areas to the south and suburbia.

Every boundary review, not just the current extreme gerrymander, leads to a net reduction in Labour seats. So in order to win we have to pick up increasingly counterintuitive and very specific and sometimes mutually contradictory (eg needing to win Guardian readers in Brighton at the same time as Sun readers in north Kent) target groups of voters, as well as hanging on to and enthusing what’s left of our core vote.

These are not problems to do with Ed Miliband’s leadership (his personal ratings while low are slowly going up) they are problems that any of the leadership contenders would have faced. They are problems that our whole party faces.

So when I hear people panic about Ed having a less funny joke at PMQs than Cameron; or we go behind in a couple of polls; or deliberately undermine Ed’s leadership for sectarian reasons; I get angry.

All the polling shows speculating about a new leader is pointless as there is no available Labour figure who could, if somehow appointed, wave a magic wand and take us to 1997 levels of popularity.

We need to show some respect for a leader who has been dealt an unbelievably bad strategic hand by circumstances but is making steady progress. Under Ed last May we got our best local government vote share outside a general election year since 1998. We are set for more impressive gains this May. We have just won our fifth impressive by-election victory in a row in Feltham and Heston. There is something insane about judging Ed on his jokes at PMQs rather than his performance in real elections.

We have sustained what I believe is the realistic maximum level we can in the polls given the Lib Dem vote has no further to fall and Tory voters are currently getting the cuts they wanted and have yet to personally feel any adverse consequences.

Under Ed there hasn’t been a lurch to the left or a split in the party as there was after every previous Labour defeat. In fact the party is more united than it has been for many years. We haven’t been proposing extreme policies or selecting crazy candidates.

Ed has developed a narrative about the ‘squeezed middle’ which has started to resonate with the electorate and illustrates that the target group of voters he wants to win back is the same one Tony Blair did: people who sit in the middle of the socioeconomic and political spectrums.

His conference speech and subsequent major speeches have been about developing a social democracy for austere times that is about promoting manufacturing-led economic growth and changing the rules of society and the economy to help ordinary people, rather than proposing spending increases that are incompatible with the deficit reduction we will still need to do as the coalition won’t have been able to achieve it. This shows he is serious about what needs to be our number one goal, because it is the number one measure that voters judge parties on, restoring our economic credibility.

As a party we have wasted incalculable energy, unity, time and political capital on undermining our last two leaders.

We cannot afford to do so again.

We need to have a sober understanding of the strategic problems facing Labour and how tough it will be to get from our 2010 position to winning in 2015.

We need to grasp that there is no quick fix that will suddenly make us wildly popular again. This is about slowly, steadily restoring the public’s trust in us to govern.

We should be a bit more upbeat about the remarkable progress we have made under Ed Miliband’s leadership from a very low point in May 2010.

And we need to put all our political energy into helping Ed Miliband with his task of rebuilding Labour.

The right of the party have a particular responsibility in this regard. It is our raison d’être and our historic task to provide Labour leaders with the stable political base they need to do their jobs.

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Luke Akehurst is a constituency representative on Labour’s NEC, a councillor in Hackney, writes regularly for Progress here, and blogs here