When Ed Miliband ran for the Labour leadership in 2010, his supporters boasted that he spoke human. Tonight, in a question time session with a group of young people broadcast on BBC3, Miliband showed flashes of his ability to connect with an audience.
But, overall, it was a patchy performance. Miliband was very good on some subjects and dealt neatly with some left-field questions. However, he still doesn’t have the right answer to the question of whether he would do a deal with the SNP after the election in the event of a hung parliament. He dismissed the ideas as ‘a piece of nonsense from the Tories’. But, in contrast to a grand coalition with the Tories, he didn’t actually rule it out.
Predictably, Miliband got asked about drugs. When asked if he found cannabis in his sons’ rooms whether he would take them to the police or the doctors, he appeared to reply ‘neither’. But Miliband missed the opportunity to deliver the kind of warning about the dangers of the drug that Rachel Reeves delivered so powerfully to schoolchildren earlier this week.
One awkward moment came when an audience member accused Miliband of having ‘stabbed his brother in the back’. Miliband replied, reasonably, that was not how he saw it. But the question was a reminder that this whole issue is going to get dragged up repeatedly on the campaign trail.
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