When a political party repeatedly uses an attack line it is nearly always because their polling shows that it works. This is certainly why the Tories keep calling Ed Miliband ‘weak’. Indeed, they’re so keen to keep hitting him with this charge that they’ve stopped accusing him of knifing his brother for fear of undercutting it.
This is one of the many things that makes Miliband’s speech tomorrow so important. The Tories are desperate to portray Miliband as a weak leader being pushed around by the ‘bully boys’ of the trade union machine. If Miliband is seen to have ducked the issue, the Tories will have yet more ammunition for their ‘weak, weak, weak’ attacks.
The most dramatic option for tomorrow, ending the unions’ link with Labour, is off the table. Miliband’s use of the very American phrase ‘mend it, don’t end it’ to describe his attitude to the link, suggests that he’s going for incremental not fundamental reform. It was Bill Clinton who pioneered the use of this phrase in US politics and it was nearly always to disguise the fact he wasn’t actually doing that much.
What will be crucial to how the speech is received is how Labour grandees react to it. If the Blunketts, Reids and Milburns come out and say it is no enough, the speech will simply compound Miliband’s problems.
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