Weeks of lurid details of sex, drug-fuelled parties, fraternal healings, ‘nightmare colleagues’ and continuing rumblings over allegations of vote-rigging – November was just another month in the Labour party. And yet Labour entered the final month of 2013 in robust shape. It is, as the Daily Telegraph’s Benedict Brogan so elegantly put it, the ‘strange rise of Labour’. Lesser details have sunk many a politician, it must be noted. And while not quite a juggernaut, a party that for so long feared for its future, and the man at its helm no doubt fearing for his, retains a credible – if unspectacular – poll lead and the increasing confidence that it can all but shrug off the Conservatives’ increasingly desperate attacks. That the party emerged relatively unscathed from a month of revelations it dearly would not have wished to have emerged may say more about Westminster’s insatiable appetite for disgrace and dishonour but also, frankly, that the great British public barely notice, and much less care about, the trials that stop time within SW1. The autumn statement delivered yesterday, and key marginal polling released this week, will have a far greater bearing on the body politic.
The first honest observation of note to make is that from the November travails Ed Miliband is proving himself a remarkably robust leader of the opposition. He does, though I daresay he would not welcome the comparison, share many of the characteristics of the bête noire of the Labour party, Tony Blair, in his Teflon-like nature. The party had to suspend a crack-smoking churchman with the deepest of links to its heritage and funding, including the office of the shadow chancellor. The Falkirk revelations refused to die a death, and, a key member of the leader of the opposition’s office was exposed as thinking that the shadow chancellor is a ‘nightmare’ to deal with.
But on the cost-of-living crisis the party has tapped into the national consciousness. Few believe, and even fewer tangibly see, the nation’s economy recovering in the way the Conservatives are saying. George Osborne may have paraded triumphantly during his statement yesterday, aided by a doting press this morning, but the immediate reaction from the polls was for the Labour lead to widen to 12 per cent.
To distract the debate the Tories and their media allies have embarked on a deliberate campaign of what the Labour leader has labelled ‘gutter politics’. The party has taken advice from our comrades in Australia on how to refute the politics of Lynton Crosby, a not-particularly-welcome Australian export. Crosby has masterminded election victories in London twice over Labour, but he also has the Conservatives’ dismal 2005 general election campaign on his CV, as well as the much less heralded 2009 Libertas campaign – with Crosby’s help, it fielded more than 500 candidates a year later. All but one failed. Beatable he most certainly is.
With Crosby’s arrival and Osborne’s cynical political traps laid yesterday the Conservative party have now categorically cast off any pretence of the modernising zeal that was initially ushered in by a fresh-faced David Cameron some eight years ago. The United Kingdom Independence party to his right, and a disintegrating Liberal Democrat party folding into Labour on his left, has made his electoral challenge, already a great one, nigh on impossible. This sobering realisation has caused the party synonymous with British rule to collectively lose its head. The greatest beneficiary is the Labour party. And, while the public cannot yet see Labour as the party of power, their collective thoughts on the Conservative party are almost unprintable.
And finally: this week saw Progress launch the findings of focus group polling conducted in key marginals. These findings matter far more than any more Westminster tittle-tattle. Lizzie from Crewe, Nilesh from Finchley and Keith from Harlow will decide the next general election, not headlines over an errant Labour banker. If Miliband has pacified or won over some or all over these voters come 2015, then no manner of scandals, embarrassing revelations or rightwing headlines will stop the strange rise of Labour.
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David Talbot is a political consultant. He tweets @_davetalbot and writes the Countdown to 2015 column as part of the Campaign for a Labour Majority