Labour Isn't Working

For years the Labour Party assured the nation that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown got on like a house on fire, but after losing the 2010 general election the truth finally came tumbling out and confirmed what insiders knew already - that the leading figures were best of enemies rather than best of friends.

But nonetheless an open secret inside the Labour Party and Labour Government was 'spun' very successfully for years, even as politicians knifed and undermined each other, and so the voters were prevented from understanding how dysfunctional things had become.

Now some of this bad blood is just the stuff of politics because rivalries and enmities 
arise amongst politicians just as they do in every other walk of life, yet the only way that most people get to see and hear what's really going on is when journalists paint a picture of life inside the Westminster bubble.

So this piece from The Sunday Times on the current state of the Labour Party has the ring of truth to me because it reflects my own view and all the recent opinion polls which is that Ed Miliband has been a huge disappointment. 


Miliband isn't working

Even his own supporters think he’s weak and weird. Tim Shipman and Francesca Angelini reveal a crisis of confidence in Labour’s leader

Tim Shipman and Francesca Angelini - The Sunday Times



The Strangers’ Bar in the House of Commons is known as “the Kremlin” because it is the favoured haunt of thirsty Labour MPs. On a warm night in March two members of the shadow cabinet were savouring the latest coalition setback with a group of backbenchers. “So will we win the election?” an MP asked. One of the frontbenchers replied: “Of course we’re going to win!”

Fast-forward three months to last week and the same shadow minister was studying the bottom of his wine glass with less glee. “We can win,” he said. “But not if we carry on like this.”

Today’s YouGov poll for The Sunday Times puts Labour on 38%, six points clear of the Tories — more than enough to put Ed Miliband in Downing Street with a healthy majority after the general election next May.

However, shadow ministers, Labour MPs and even some Miliband intimates believe they will fall short. Labour’s lead does not match the 15-point advantage that David Cameron enjoyed at the same stage in the last parliament and governments traditionally regain ground as polling day approaches.

Senior figures in the party brief that Miliband is “weird”. His personal ratings have been in steady decline since he became leader.

Recent efforts to generate positive publicity have brought ridicule. Photographs of Miliband eating a bacon sandwich were the most disastrous interface of politician and food since his brother David brandished a banana.

An attempt to curry favour with The Sun by posing with the paper’s World Cup special edition led to an outcry from Labour MPs in Liverpool, where the newspaper’s coverage of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster is still a running sore.

Miliband issued a half-hearted apology that pleased no one. Then came a poll showing that 43% of Labour voters think he should be ditched as leader.

What has gone wrong? What do Miliband’s problems say about the sort of prime minister he would be? Why do many of his own supporters think he is not up to the job? And what does he plan to do about it?

INSIDERS speak of policy disagreements, personality clashes and poor party management, framed and exacerbated by the character of the leader. Labour’s focus groups show he is still tainted by the act of political fratricide in beating his brother David to the leadership. Women voters think it odd that he was only belatedly added to the birth certificate of his first child.

According to YouGov, just 11% of voters think he is a strong leader, compared with 51% who say he is weak. Only 16% think he is “an asset” for his party; 43% believe he is “a liability”. A mere 14% think he “looks and sounds like a prime minister” while 70% disagree. Just 21% think he is “up to the job” while 60% do not.

Asked who has been the best Labour leader only 2% name Miliband, half as many as for Neil Kinnock, the loser of the 1992 election, and just 1% ahead of Michael Foot, who was beaten by a landslide in 1983.

The view that Douglas Alexander, Labour’s campaign manager, has shared with his colleagues is that Miliband has succeeded in the first task of opposition: to foster a sense of “grievance” among voters. He is also ahead of Cameron in the second leg: showing “empathy” for their plight.

Miliband is now starting a third phase: demonstrating that he has solutions to voters’ problems. “We need big reform, not big spending,” as one influential figure puts it.

That process moved forward last week when the Labour leader endorsed aspects of a 250-page report, The Condition of Britain, by the centre-left think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research, responding to criticism that he lacks policies.

The complaint that lingers, though, is that Miliband cannot explain his ideas to voters in language they can understand. Just one in four voters thinks he is “in touch with ordinary people”, while 56% say he is “out of touch”.

John Denham, Miliband’s former parliamentary aide, has privately warned that working-class voters “don’t believe they are in any story that Labour is telling about the future of this country”. He told an event earlier this month: “If they’re not part of our story, I don’t know what the Labour party is for.”

A Labour frontbencher said: “We communicate in a language most people neither speak nor understand. It is the language of the Westminster bubble. Ed is surrounded by people who have not lived ordinary lives but have lived in the Westminster bubble.”

The critique also applies to Miliband, who worked as a researcher for Harriet Harman and special adviser to Gordon Brown before becoming an MP.

It is a refrain heard in Miliband’s own constituency of Doncaster North. Caroline Brailsford, 38, runs a card shop in the former mining village of Bentley, less than a mile from Miliband’s constituency office, but has never seen him there.

“He’s never had a job outside of politics, so how can he understand what life is life for normal people?” she said.

“He also lacks presence — he’s too wishy-washy. I don’t think he could ever be prime minister.”

It is a struggle to find a fan of Miliband in Doncaster, even among Labour party members. Kimberley Dale, 31, a pharmacist, is a strong Labour supporter but believes a north London intellectual such as Miliband does not understand what life is like for a working family.

“I vote Labour because I’m working class, my family has always voted Labour and their policies help working families more than the others, but I’m not a Miliband supporter. He’s done little for Doncaster and he has no real experience of life,” said the mother of five.

“I went to speak to him once about issues I was having [with] renting and he basically said he couldn’t do anything. I’d like to see him try to live on my wage.”

Steven Ratcliffe, 36, a Doncaster taxi driver, said: “David Miliband would have been a better candidate than Ed — he actually had some experience.”

Miliband’s office has been created in his own image. His closest aides are Stewart Wood, a former Oxford academic who shares his analysis that untrammelled Anglo-Saxon capitalism has failed, and an old Oxford friend, Marc Stears, who writes his speeches.

Miliband’s campaign director Spencer Livermore, policy director Torsten Henricson-Bell and strategy director Greg Beales are also at the wonkish end of the spectrum.

Shadow cabinet members complain that Miliband’s team refuse to get their hands dirty. “They think there’s this great machine that will make things happen and then they go to lunch. There is no one who really understands the Labour party,” said one.

The Sun photograph was a case in point. The decision to do it was taken without any consultation of Liverpool MPs by Anna Yearley, Miliband’s political secretary, who was under fire again yesterday amid reports that she had been accused of bullying a colleague. Allies of Yearley and Bob Roberts, the communications director, heaped blame on each other for the Sun debacle.

“Our problem is that we either take three months to make a decision or just three seconds,” said one aide.

In a lacerating blog, the former spin doctor Damian McBride said Miliband’s team were “well-spoken, well-read, well-connected and if you stay on their right side, quite genial . . . But what they are not is fighters.” The blog was widely circulated among disgruntled MPs.

Miliband’s inner circle is also accused of excluding most of the shadow cabinet from decision making. Its meetings are choreographed in advance.

“Everyone Ed wants to hear gets contacted in advance and asked to prepare talking points. It’s all stage-managed. He’ll say: ‘Gloria or Chuka or Sadiq, have you got anything you want to add?’ People don’t even pipe up unless they’ve been called upon by Ed,” said a source.

Miliband’s aides say they “plead guilty to being organised” but insist it is “ridiculous” to say that frontbenchers cannot state their views.

Yet the organisational dysfunction is such that some of those who are close to Miliband cannot imagine working for him in government. One of his inner circle was recently asked what he would do if Miliband became prime minister. The reply: “I’d get the hell out of there as fast as I could.”

IF Miliband himself is one impediment to Labour success, the other is the consistent view of voters that Labour cannot be trusted with the economy. Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, does not want to commit to final spending plans until January at the earliest.

A senior member of the shadow cabinet said: “It’s fine to save the precise announcements until January or February of election year. That’s what Gordon [Brown] did. But Gordon also spent months and months talking about how we would spend wisely, not excessively.”

Underlying all the tensions is a belief among Miliband’s allies that Balls, his wife Yvette Cooper, and Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, are plotting against him and keeping their heads down to avoid blame at a difficult time. Balls’s allies acknowledge that when Miliband goes, Balls will seek to secure the leadership for Cooper. But they deny that he would ever act against Miliband.

They also counter that Balls has submerged himself because he has been quietly trying to repair the damage Miliband has done to Labour’s reputation with business by a series of announcements that his government would intervene in the markets. Balls’s frustration is shared by Lord Mandelson, the former trade secretary, who said last week that the party needed to explain “how we’re going to bring about economic growth”.

It is to craft that narrative that Labour has hired David Axelrod, President Barack Obama’s former chief strategist who helped him to win the 2012 US election despite Obama trailing in the polls on economic competence.

Labour still remains the favourite to win the election, regardless of it all. The political system is stacked in its favour. Cameron would need a lead of about seven points on election day to get a working majority. Labour chiefs also believe they have a better ground operation than the Conservatives.

Miliband’s aides say they are getting on the front foot. Party chiefs met on Friday to map out a “news grid” of announcements for the summer months, after criticism that they had left the field clear for the Tories last August. Senior members of the shadow cabinet will have their holidays put on a rota.

Lord Adonis, the former transport secretary, is set to publish plans to make cities outside London hubs of economic growth. Miliband and Balls will appear with Mandelson and Lord Sainsbury at an event designed to mend fences with business.

Miliband will talk about his plans for infrastructure off the back of a report by Sir John Armitt, who led delivery of the London Olympics. The following week he will announce plans to boost skills.

“After four years of Ed’s leadership we are competitive in a way that many people thought we would not be,” a close aide said.

“No other opposition has come back with a majority in just one term. We can win.”

A frontbencher warned, however, that Miliband needs to improve if he is to rule effectively. “The local elections were supposed to be a road test for the campaign, but the car nearly broke down,” he said.

“Voters have kicked the tyres and aren’t convinced. We probably have the [fuel] to trundle across the finishing line, but we don’t look ready for government.”