We’re really only seven months away from the launch of the general election campaign. Of course, it’s nine months chronologically but with summer holidays in August and Christmas and New Year you effectively lose two months of that. The next period is going to be decisive.

September will bring the referendum which will see Scotland reject separatism. This will be a triumph for a campaign that is Labour from top to bottom. But expect David Cameron to discover his inner Mod and don a Pete Townshend-style Union Flag suit and claim that he won it. That’ll be a distraction. In the end, Scotland won’t buy it and England won’t care. The real post-September fact will be the all-out assault on Ed Miliband. The bacon butty coverage was a mere amuse-bouche. Well may Neil Kinnock have come to Ed’s defence last week for we will soon see the attempted Kinnockisation of Ed.

One answer is to stand firm; the power of the press is overstated. At the last Australian general election Rupert Murdoch ordered his papers to tear down Labor. At the end of it all, you could not point to a single seat that Labor lost because of that coverage – all the damage to the ALP was self-inflicted.

But the best form of defence is attack. While the Tories try to reconcile triumphalism – ‘Rejoice, the economy is growing’ – with fear – ‘It’s so bad we need years’ more austerity’ – let Labour make attractive and popular offers in our core areas. And that means health and education.

Time for Tristram Hunt and Andy Burnham to come up with the goods. For Tristram the issue is standards. It is time to abandon his line of attack on free schools. The flaw in them is not that they create extra capacity in areas where it is not needed. That is the dessicated calculating machine of the Treasury speaking. The problem is that they are a badly implemented version of successful Labour reforms. Spare capacity isn’t a problem in itself – it allows choice and therefore competition which drives up standards. The complex governance of so many schools which shackles parental choice is a problem, as is the failure to learn the lessons of London Challenge and spread them across the country.

For Andy the challenge is finance. There is a mad idea running round the party that the NHS budget should not be ringfenced. The Tories would like nothing more than that. Existing protections to health should be maintained with a pledge to establish – in office – ‘An Extraordinary Commission to Suppress Terrorism’, or in other words an enquiry into the finances of the NHS. To save Andy time I have written the conclusion – ‘It’s much worse than we thought.’

In parallel with that process there needs to be crunchy offer for the punter. I’m pretty sure that Greg Beales has some ideas from the research. Here’s two things it can’t be. One is merging healthcare and social care to create a National Care Service. For one thing, who cares? It’s a lovely, technical, top-down reform that will make some services better for some patients after a long time and a lot of extra cash. It will cost, not save, money. On the other hand, it can’t be more free stuff. There is no money. And, anyway, free stuff is wrong in principle. It has to be that mythical policy that is memorable, popular, ready to implement and costs nothing.

Our substance versus their spin. The race is on.

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David Cameron is the new Arthur Scargill. The prime minister’s new doctrine is that losing doesn’t matter as long as you are fighting for a principle. Scargill couldn’t have put it better: ‘I may have destroyed a great union and caused the demise of an entire industry, but I was fighting for a principle. And that’s what matters.’

If he doesn’t watch out Cameron will become the patron saint of lost causes. In the end there’s no way to spin it. The point in leadership is to win, and when you can’t win to appear to win. When you can’t even appear to win then you need to pretend not to be in a fight at all.

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There has been much pontification about the meaning of England’s failure in the World Cup. Agonised columns about what it says about the country? We had the bizarre spectacle of football players apologising to the country. And the equally bizarre proposition by one journalist that the country should be apologising to the players.

What is so odd is that if it matters so much to us that we win then something should be done about it. And not by the FA. We know that they are excellent at one thing – failure. (Or maybe two, if you include overpaying poor managers.) If the public want something then government should deliver. Tessa Jowell showed the way when a national programme targetted money on potential winners. The result was a record medal haul. With Tessa standing down from parliament next year here’s one last service she can do to the nation – win the next World Cup for England.