Ed Miliband starts the year with a 10-point lead over the Tories and with support over 40 per cent – an important breakthrough. I was pleased to see that his speech to the Fabians on Saturday was not at all triumphalist, but focused on beginning to flesh out the idea of One Nation. Many of the headlines about the speech gave the impression that it was one long apology for New Labour. It wasn’t. He repeated his argument that the last government didn’t sufficiently focus on ‘vested interests at the top’ and talking about immigration, but most of the speech was forward-looking. If the headlines were due to briefing, I hope that they’ll soon stop. A focus on past ‘mistakes’ and a failure to celebrate past success is precisely what the Tories and Lib Dems want us to do – that’s why they spend all their time asking for apologies. The polls suggest that we now have ‘permission’ to talk about our alternative programme for government – let’s get on with doing that.
In the section on economic policy, it was good to hear Ed talking about the ‘forgotten wealth creators’ and how they can be positively encouraged and supported. I’m keen to see how this work alongside the industrial policy review led by Andrew Adonis will enable us to build a positive programme for business growth.
David Cameron tried to get off to a positive start with the launch of the government’s ‘Ronseal’ progress review on Monday. I can remember the few times that the last government tried to do an annual report – an enormous amount of paper was generated, drafts were reviewed and tweaked and then the report was launched to a fanfare of apathy. People are more interested in experiencing good government than in reading about it. What does make headlines are the failures to deliver – which we learned about later in the week when the ‘appendix of failure’ had to be produced. By the way, hasn’t anyone in government yet read the memo about using opaque folders when taking sensitive papers in and out of Downing Street?
Yesterday we learned that Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s former policy chief currently on ‘sabbatical’ in the US had told a seminar that the PM often finds out about government policy from the news and often doesn’t agree with it. He tries to suggest that this has always been the way that Downing Street works. He’s wrong. In my 10 years as a minister I never made an announcement which hadn’t gone through the ‘grid’ process which Damian McBride wrote about in a blog yesterday. Second, and even more importantly, prime ministers who know what’s going on are the ones who have set a clear direction in the first place. Cameron made much of criticising the supposed control-freakery of No 10 in the last Labour government. Actually, David, it’s what Tony Blair used to call ‘grip’ and you haven’t got it.
Finally, Nick Clegg started his weekly phone-in on LBC radio. This was a considerable publicity coup for both LBC and Nick Clegg, but it feels like one of those decisions which is better in the short term than the longer term. Does the deputy prime minister really have an hour to spare every week for one radio station? How interesting will it be for the listeners to hear government policy being defended week after week? To a certain extent, Clegg has little to lose from taking a risk like this, but I wonder if it really will still be going in three months’ time – and if anyone will be listening!
Happy new year!
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Jacqui Smith is former home secretary, writes the Monday Politics column for Progress, and tweets @smithjj62
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