Today’s Ipsos MORI finding that voters can’t see Ed Miliband as Prime Minister underlines how much hard work the Labour leader really has to do. The poll for the Evening Standard found 66 per cent of those asked didn’t believe he was ready to rule the country, against 24 per cent who did. He is also polling behind his party, with 58 per cent disagreeing that Labour is ready to form the next government against 29 per cent who do.
As the general election draws closer, voters will find their minds focus more on this question of whether they can imagine the party governing rather than simply on Labour as what Tony Blair described as a ‘repository for people’s anger’. And as they do that, they’ll want to know what it is that Labour stands for rather than simply what it is that Labour opposes.
How does Miliband communicate that to voters, though? He spent the first two years of his leadership giving speeches containing the phrase ‘this is who I am’, but in the autumn, he started to tell us what it is he believes. Commentators have insisted that this is the year when he needs to say what it is he wants to do. To be fair to him, he has started doing that: those ‘concrete steps’ he promised in his new year message are appearing, one after another on the grand Labour policy staircase. It is no longer fair to open a piece with ‘finally, Ed Miliband has unveiled a real policy’ as it was a few months ago.
At this week’s PLP meeting, I’m told Miliband reminded MPs of how much policy he has announced so far, to reassure them. But he must avoid confusing announcements that interest the Westminster lobby (and in the run-up to his 10p rate speech in February, he was struggling to do that, too) with emblems that catch the eye of the normal busy voter.
In his interview with Shifting Grounds, published today, the Labour leader says:
‘Part of Cameron’s problem is that he was hugging a husky in 2006 and hugging a hoodie in 2007, and now he doesn’t care about the huskies and he wants to lock up the hoodies. There’s no sense of consistency. In a way, people sometimes say that I’m too interested in ideas, redistribution and all those sort of wonky things. Of course you’ve got to make the ideas mean something at the kitchen table, but getting the ideas right, the intellectual foundations, is absolutely crucial. And they’re particularly crucial in tough times. It’s easier in good times. But in tough times you’ve got to have a robust sense of where you stand.’
Miliband does make a strong point about hugging something you really truly want to hug, rather than something you’ve been told to hug by a party strategist. But he shouldn’t reject the idea of an emblematic gesture just because David Cameron didn’t set a very good example in his choice of hugging victim. One senior Labour figure I spoke to this week argued that this is the year when Miliband needs to find his own big gestures – not just wonky moments – that really cut through to the public and show them a big, bright signpost on where the party is heading. They didn’t even agree that an announcement as bold as the reintroduction of the 10p rate would cut through. He needs something more visual than that. Otherwise it will continue to be difficult for voters to work out what a Prime Minister Miliband in Number 10 would really look and sound like.
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