Well, the Labour party certainly knows how to give the appearance of a fight when its back is against the wall. Many MPs and supporters have spent quite a lot of this fine autumn day tweeting frantically that this morning’s unpleasant headlines (summarised in their full gory glory by James here) are a plot by the media to stop their thoroughly decent leader making it to Downing Street and why aren’t we all writing about the problems that David Cameron has with the Conservative party instead?
They protest too much: if lobby journalists were organised enough to compile time sheets, most of us would quite clearly have spent the bulk of our time since the 2010 election writing about Tory misery, not Labour. In fact, the Labour party might have a thing or two to learn from the endless chronicles of Conservative unrest:
1. Don’t pretend bad headlines are just nonsense.
Alright, tell the chap with the camera and the microphone that the headlines are nonsense, but have a good long think about why more and more of your frontbenchers seem keen to brief journalists about their dissatisfaction.
David Cameron’s woes have stemmed from and then been exacerbated by his failure to listen to what his party has to tell him.
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