Ed Miliband has spent the past few months celebrating the success of his conference pledge to freeze energy prices. He was so pleased with the disruption that this caused that he referenced it in his speech on banking reform today.
He is right to be pleased with that pledge. It was a hit. It’s just that today’s speech, built up by the Miliband camp as the sequel to the price freeze, was the political equivalent of a difficult second album.
You could see what he was trying to do. Sections of the speech were straight from the Obama playbook, just as his conference speech was, with appeals such as ‘Britain can do better than this’ and lines such as ‘we believe we can tip the balance away from struggle and towards hope’. But the playbook lines weren’t played very well.
Once he’d finished the speech, he immediately relaxed and performed far better in the question-and-answer session that followed.
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