I’m picturing next year’s John Lewis Christmas ad. To the sound of an acoustic guitar and an earnest vocal, it opens with footage of a lonely Ed Miliband, wandering the dark, deserted streets of Westminster. Melancholic, he presses his face against the glass of a Downing Street window to see others – not him – enjoying the amber warmth inside. He comes home and shakes the rain from his coat, looking rejected and dejected. But there is a glistening tree, smiling friends and some discreetly placed John Lewis merchandise to welcome him back. Message: he may not have power, but at least he has Christmas.
OK, maybe it needs some work. But you’ll notice the unstated assumption. It’s the same one, long shared by many Labour MPs, which broke surface this week: Labour will lose the May election and is staring at another five years in opposition. It is this uncomplicated fear that is powering this week’s talk of a leadership crisis, even a potential challenge to Miliband. True, that talk has been stoked and fanned by newspapers who always had a hit job on the Labour leader pencilled in the diary for autumn 2014, some determined to replay against him the onslaught they unleashed against Neil Kinnockmore than two decades ago. But Labour supporters delude themselves if they think this has all been got up by the press. The first Labour MP I spoke to today put it well: “As our standing and his standing has got worse, Labour MPs talk of little else.”
Party introspection, angst and fear were always on the cards for this period – it just wasn’t meant to be Labour that would suffer. A month ago it was the Conservatives, not Labour, that lost a safe seat — Clacton — to Ukip. That same night, though it was close, Labour held on in Heywood. Yet it was the opposition, not the governing party, that promptly turned inward.
In September Labour was on the winning side of the epic struggle over Scottish independence. The Nationalists lost by a 10-point margin, and lost their leader as a result. Yet today the SNP is surging. Its membership has more than tripled since that defeat, heading north of 80,000. (Imagine a UK party with more than 800,000 members.) After a smooth coronation, the SNP has a new leader full of vigour in Nicola Sturgeon. Meanwhile, Scottish Labour is eating itself, the former leader departing amid rancour. Labour now fears a rout in Scotland, with one analysis suggesting the loss of up to 20 seats. Such a collapse could, on its own, keep Miliband out of Downing Street.
A party in poor health
When even victories taste like defeat, a political party is in poor health. Allies of the leader defend him by saying Miliband has got Labour into the right place on all the issues: from freezing energy bills to ending the bedroom tax, from increasing the living wage to restoring the 50p rate on income tax. But that argument backfires. If the message is so right, how come Labour’s poll lead is shrivelling – unless there’s something wrong with the messenger?
So if Miliband is the problem, a “hindrance” to Labour’s fortunes as the Fabian Society’s head puts it, what’s the solution? His opponents have the script worked out. Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell, Alistair Darling and Ed Balls — today’s men in grey suits — would call on the former home secretary Alan Johnson and tell him: your party needs you. They would have to overcome Johnson’s lack of personal ambition, and promise him a smooth, unchallenged succession, total loyalty and constant support.
If Johnson said yes, runs the theory, the game would change overnight. “If people thought [Johnson] was available,” says one former minister, “there’d be a stampede to Ed’s office. He would be finished immediately.”
In an instant Labour would stand apart from the now hated Westminster class. No longer would Labour be lumped in with the Tories and Lib Dems as part of a Tweedledum, Tweedlethree elite, in which the troika of Westminster party leaders – all fortysomething ex-spads mocked for never having done a proper day’s work in their lives – are indistinguishable from each other. Johnson has more hinterland than Cameron, Clegg and Miliband put together, a life storythat is compelling, even inspiring. If stockbroker Nigel Farage dared lecture former postman Johnson on life in the real world, he’d get very short shrift.
Trouble is, even those who unfurl this grand masterplan admit it belongs in the realm of fantasy. Johnson lacks the hunger to seize the top job. So what’s the alternative? In the absence of an obvious successor, one who could unite the party with just six months to go till the election, Labour could keep on doing what it’s doing now: more half-hearted semi-plotting, trading gossip rather than strategy, planning a collective sulk rather than a coup.
Worst of both worlds
But this is the worst of both worlds, wounding Ed Miliband without toppling him. Those who watched Gordon Brown’s premiership play out know how this movie ends: in a Labour defeat. Indeed, even Miliband’s most irreconcilable critics are clear why they should avoid plotting of the non-lethal variety. For when defeat comes next May, they want it to be Miliband – and his brand of leftist populism – that is blamed, not division and disunity. In the interests of winning the postmortem, they’ll keep their mouths shut.
That, though, is a counsel of despair. There is still another way. It is to shift the focus off Miliband and even away from Labour. Instead, the party’s loudest and clearest voices – Johnson among them – should start describing what the country would look like under another Tory-led government. A zero-hours Britain that could well stumble out of the European Union in an act of internal Tory party management; a country of ever-stagnant wages, suffocating personal debt and shredded human rights protections; a union imperilled by a Conservative administration tin-eared to the demands of the people of Scotland; a country slamming down the shutters against immigrants and the wider world.
Call it negative campaigning, if you like, but listen to the passion with which Peter Hain made that case on the radio today. It’s not a great advertisement for the current team that Labour’s best advocates are still the stars of the Blair/Brown era, but save that concern for after May. For now, if Labour is stuck with Miliband, it needs to throw everything it has at exposing the consequences of five more years of Cameron. There is so little time left, it has little other choice.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
