His detractors think he’s Neil Kinnock. His adherents think he’s Barack Obama. But the politician who Ed Miliband most resembles is François Hollande.
For the most part, that should cheer Labour: President Hollande is, after all, a wonkish and non-traditional leader who went on to rout a centre-right politician who once claimed to be the heir to Blair, and turned out to be nothing more than a craven salesman. But now is the moment of maximum peril in the Hollande strategy: now, having taken command of the left, the leadership seeks to convince the centre. Do it wrong, or, too hesitantly, and the party could end up with a disaffected left flank and an unreconciled right, but the price of not trying at all is far higher.
Labour’s falling ratings represent both validation and rebuke for the party’s thinking tendency. On the one hand, it is now impossible to argue that the party’s lead is anything other than soft; the foolishness of depending on a baggy coalition of the disaffected, the disgruntled and the disinclined to vote altogether is now completely exposed. On the other, though, it is precisely as the two Eds have responded to the concerns raised both here and elsewhere that Labour’s lead has gone walkabout.
In part, that’s because, as is almost always the case, the fundamentals of politics currently favour the government. The day before the 2012 budget, I wrote that “this will almost certainly be a budget that confirms the ascendancy of the Conservatives”, an article which could have only been more wrongheaded if I had ended it with an instruction to stockpile jerrycans full of petrol. But for all I was dead wrong then, I was essentially right to say that budget battles – in which the full might of the British government comes against the combined forces of an often cash-strapped opposition – are largely asymmetrical and generally favour the incumbent.
Of course George Osborne ended the week looking more like a chancellor than Ed Balls: he’s the chancellor already. David Cameron made an unconvincing prime minister until he was on the doorstep of Number 10, when he was instantly transformed into the most prime ministerial politician in the country. The problem isn’t that Ed Miliband ‘looks weak’; he’s the leader of the opposition, he is weak. Labour is weak; one of the many reasons why we shouldn’t have surrendered power so tamely in 2010 is because it is a lot easier to shuffle off the stage than it is get a part in the play to begin with.
So, any opportunity for the Conservatives to remind the country that they are in power and that Labour isn’t is, by definition, going to rebound in their favour. International summits are always good for a bounce, just look at the afterglow enjoyed by Tony Blair after his G8 summits. The Tories’ poll ratings are actually experiencing a significantly smaller rebound than Gordon Brown’s did after he averted the ‘end of money’, and look what happened to him.
That said, we shouldn’t pretend that it’s simply a Commons statement and an international talking-shop that have left the Conservatives newly emboldened. Part of Labour’s slipping rating is the result of genuine opposition to the direction the Eds are taking. If the party could promise an end to austerity: if instead of ‘iron discipline’, the party could pledge double-digit growth and a lowered cost of living, if the taps of public spending could once again begin flowing freely, then Labour might find itself in a rather stronger position.
There’s just one small problem: the party can’t promise any of those things. Becoming the government in 2015 is going to be hard, but it will be a cakewalk compared to actually being the government after 2015. The Eds are finding the right path to both: now the challenge is to hold their nerve.
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