Is this the reason Miliband forgot to mention the deficit in his conference speech?

Earlier this month Patrick Wintour wrote an in-depth profile of Ed Miliband’s failed election campaign for the Guardian. In it, he went through the different things which had gone wrong for the Labour Party in the lead up to the election.

He began the piece by focussing on Miliband’s speech in September at the Labour Conference where he forgot to mention the deficit – a mistake that cost him later in the campaign. Wintour says that according to a Labour source, a late change to his speech to include Isis meant he was ‘off his game’:

‘He was not quite sure in his head where he was, so when he got to the bit where the deficit should have been, he just started a different section. I remember immediately thinking ‘sh-t’, but I thought perhaps he had shuffled it around because I had seen him do that before.’

However Mr S understands that a bout of illness may have been what, in part, caused Miliband’s lacklustre performance. A new Channel 5 documentary titled ‘Inside Manchester’s Midland Hotel’ documents the inner workings at the hotel which hosted the fateful Labour conference.

In an episode that aired on Monday night, they tell the story of Leanne, a 20-year-old waitress, who is put on room service duty for Ed and Justine Miliband. Leanne receives a request for hot water after Miliband tells her the day before that he is coming down with ‘a bit of a cold’:

‘They want a bigger bowl so I’m going to take this one up to him and see if it will do the job. He’s got his big speech later on, like his final speech from conference so maybe if he’s not feeling too great this might help a bit.’

Meanwhile, the documentary reveals that Samantha Cameron isn’t the only political wag to be ‘beach body ready‘. While Miliband plumped for poached eggs and toast for breakfast on the day of the speech, Justine ordered porridge made with skimmed milk. With the kitchen out of the slimline variety of milk, Justine, who only drinks skimmed milk, handily had her own stash to loan the kitchen. Expect to see her adorning the front page of the Mail any day now.