There was a fun game we used to play during Gordon Brown’s premiership: counting the number of ‘buck up, or we kick you out’ ultimatums that Labour MPs delivered to their leader. There were, suffice to say, a lot of them. And tallying them up illustrated two things: the constant, sapping pressure that the Brown leadership was under, and Labour’s persistent inability to actually finish him off.
I mention it now because of this story in today’s Mail on Sunday. It collects the increasingly public criticism of Ed Miliband by his own MPs, including Graham Stringer’s warning that ‘Ed has got to get a grip and turn it around before the May elections.’ It’s not at the level of the Brown Ultimatums yet, but it’s certainly remiscent of them.
And Miliband has a number of handicaps in this game, compared to Brown. For starters, he’s an opposition leader, and is therefore more expendable than a serving Prime Minister. And then there’s the fact that he doesn’t have an obvious group of supporters in the party who would support him to the death.
In the course of ten years of covert warfare against Tony Blair, Brown gathered a unit of political operatives (including Miliband and Balls) to build and sustain his leadership, and whose futures were inextricably tied with his own. He even managed to recruit Peter Mandelson in the end. Whereas Miliband appears to have relatively few such friends. Could he always turn to Balls or Cooper, and count on their unstinting, unequivocal support? CoffeeHousers, I’ll leave the answer to you.
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