Who let Ed Miliband out again? You’d have thought that Labour HQ would have learnt from the #AskEdM debacle but apparently not. Ed popped up on Radio 5 Live today following his Made in Britain speech to answer questions from voters.
It’s hard to work out whether the callers were CCHQ staffers in disguise or ordinary members of the public, thanks to the extreme vitriol thrown at Ed. He had little of interest to say on the EU (he wouldn’t have signed the treaty), child benefit (he can’t promise to reverse the cuts) and Labour’s attitude towards business (he’s pro-, apparently). Instead, the callers took the opportunity to attack him personally. As Dot Commons reports:
‘They ranged from the biting… “You’re not going to be the Prime Minister of this country, by any stretch of the imagination and I’d put my life on that, that is not going to happen and if Labour are going to win an election it’ll need to be somebody else like Peter Hain or somebody like that.”
To the almost plain rude… “You fail to inspire, you fail to get people looking forward to getting out and getting the Labour vote out, it’s really bad what you’re doing, you’re not inspiring anyone, you’re making it hard for anyone to vote Labour.”
To the tried and tested… Caller: “We hear from David Miliband…”’ Another caller summed up the sentiment perfectly: ‘I don’t mean to be cruel but I don’t think you can do the job.’ The only really non-offensive topic was on the Miliband-Blair relationship. Ed answered that he’s had ‘some’ interaction with the former Prime Minister and revealed that although they did not agree on everything, Blair did tell him to ‘be yourself’.
One commenter on Twitter suggested that, at this stage, maybe he should try being someone else. Judging from this fruitless PR exercise, it couldn’t do his image much more harm.
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