‘I see myself as a Cameron figure’

28 August 2010

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James Forsyth meets Ed, the ‘normal’ Miliband, who says that the conventional political wisdom about Middle England is all wrong

An early indicator of how Ed Miliband would lead the Labour party comes in his attitude to the Liberal Democrats. The approach that meets with most approval from Labour supporters would be to attack them but not actually to shut off the option of doing a deal with them after the next election. But Ed says he wouldn’t do a deal with Clegg and he tells me that he wants them to live in fear of ‘teetering towards some kind of extinction come the next election’.

Miliband’s sallies against the Liberal Democrats show that he understands how to do opposition politics. If he did upset the odds and the birth order, he’d be adept at campaigning against the cuts, at finding the coalition’s weak points. But there is more doubt about whether he could make the transition to being a credible potential prime minister: would voters shy away from his ideological certainty and explicitly left-wing views when faced with the prospect of him in Downing Street, or could he shift the country leftwards in the same way that Margaret Thatcher sent it right? That is what the Labour selectorate has to decide between now and 25 September.