Leader is a Liability

Loyalty within political parties is a rare commodity which Labour knows to its cost having witnessed and undeclared war for 10 years during which supporters of Gordon Brown did their level best to undermine Tony Blair.

As the dust settles from the Euro elections and local elections in England, Labour has been displaced by UKIP as the main party of opposition which is a calamitous position for Ed Miliband to be in less than a year from the 2015 general election.

As Adam Boulton explains in this piece from The Sunday Times, senior figures in the Labour Party are willing to say 'off the record' that their leader is a liability and this is clearly true because Miliband's personal ratings are so poor, but one way or the other Labour has to address this problem - or it will go down to defeat in 2015.  


Behind the loyal bleats, Ed’s party concedes he is a liability

Adam Boulton - The Sunday Times

Has Labour got an Ed Miliband problem? It depends whether you are on or off the record. On camera, one cabinet-level colleague was the soul of loyalty, inflating the party’s moderate gains in the council elections into a championship performance. Off camera, the verdict “Ed doesn’t help” was immediately volunteered.

As the results sank in, those most willing to defend Miliband openly were also those most ambitious for themselves, such as the potential leadership contenders Ed Balls and his wife Yvette Cooper and the ubiquitous Chuka Umunna, or the London mayoral hopefuls David Lammy and Tessa Jowell. Other figures at the top of the party seemed strangely detached. The deputy leader Harriet Harman went home to bed when polling stations closed.

Off-year elections are when party spin doctors earn their keep, twisting the electoral arithmetic into bamboozling claims that their result wasn’t as bad as their opponents’. The best way to work out who’s really satisfied and who is not is to study how each party reacts, watching for who blinks first.

Labour “won” last week’s council elections. It increased its share of seats held and councils controlled. The Tories and Liberal Democrats sustained losses. But the two coalition parties maintained their discipline, accepting things had not gone well while pointing out that a swing against the government is the norm.

Labour could not hide its disappointment — a year before the general election, the council vote suggested that becoming the largest party in a hung parliament was the best it could hope for, even before the swing back to the incumbent government that usually takes place in the final months.

Labour blinking started big time. Free-thinking MPs including Graham Stringer, Simon Danczuk, John Healey and John Mann noted that the issue of “Ed” came up on the doorstep, while local government veterans headed by Ken Livingstone warned that Labour must find a way of reconnecting with the working-class voters who went to UKIP.

Labour doesn’t dump its leaders. Miliband is not the resigning type and there is no obvious voter-friendly replacement. That doesn’t mean he isn’t an issue. He lags behind his party in popularity. The surest indicator of concern were loyal bleats that what matters are policies, not personalities. Ed’s hat-trick of personal blunders in the final days of the campaign may have come too late to cost many votes but they confirmed suspicion that he is a liability.

Rule No1 for anyone in the public eye is not to be filmed eating. Even Nigel Farage is fonder of brandishing his pint than quaffing it and he never goes for the pork scratchings. The point of minders is to stop pictures of the leader chewing a bacon butty being taken. Other basic tasks include “reminding” the boss where he is and who he is campaigning for — something Miliband’s team failed to do before his disastrous interview on BBC Wiltshire last week.

These are unforced errors. Someone who makes the cost-of-living crisis the centrepiece of his pitch to voters should have some idea of the cost of the average family shop. Failing that, basic tradecraft would include avoiding the question. Boris Johnson deals with “How much is a pint of milk?” quizzes by reciting the cost of a bottle of champagne instead.

Miliband’s defenders insist his cost-of-living campaign is the key to victory despite the return to growth. They point out that most people say they have not yet felt the benefits of the recovery. The coalition’s stated priority between now and the election is to make sure they do.

In the meantime a sizeable chunk of the excluded seem ready to turn to UKIP instead of Labour. Farage has dodged Labour’s “Thatcherite” attack by deliberately binning his party’s old manifestos — flat tax, GP charges and all.

Miliband needs to win back this group but his party is split on which policies to follow. That reopens the historic arguments between new and old Labour.

Livingstone is among those arguing for a commitment to radical redistribution and market regulation. Miliband seemed sympathetic to this analysis, brushing aside the Blair-Brown era by ascribing UKIP’s success to “discontent building up for decades”. Balls argues that Labour should nod in UKIP’s direction, admitting that the unreformed EU is a basket case and unrestricted immigration has been a disaster. Others, ranging from Blairites to leftwingers, are not so sure. They blame the leadership for not fighting UKIP on the merits of the EU and migration. They argue Labour must not be anti-business.

Labour’s ruling clique has drawn comfort from the party’s strong performance in London — and UKIP’s failure to penetrate the capital — even though it already has MPs in most of the councils where it strengthened its position. Such smugness may not travel beyond the M25.

Labour’s analysis is that it was making progress in about 30 of the 40 target constituencies covered by these council elections. “Better for us than the Tories”, since it argues that UKIP blocks the Conservatives from taking seats directly from Labour.

There is some support for this in Lord Ashcroft’s poll of marginal constituencies. But another fresh Ashcroft survey of Euro election voting brings comfort to the Conservatives. All parties now expect UKIP to top the European parliament poll but Ashcroft suggests the majority of UKIP voters are ready to back David Cameron in 2015. More than 50% voted Tory last time, 50% say they would consider defecting from UKIP at the general election and two-thirds back Cameron as best prime minister.

Put these potential recruits into the equivalent vote shares calculated by Michael Thrasher and Colin Rallings and Labour would rue not even reaching the 35% share, at which cynics suggest Miliband would sneak into Downing Street. Even YouGov’s 35% Labour, 34% Conservative starts to look too flimsy for Ed.

The problem is that neither the marginal nor the share model is designed to cope with the era of multiparty politics that is now upon us. Rules of thumb are bound to be broken. Does it matter if UKIP pips Labour for first place in the European elections? What will UKIP’s vote be in the general election?

Last week’s votes increase our uncertainty. We should trust our hunches no more than we trust two-faced spokesmen and spokeswomen.