Inept, useless, incompetent, maladroit, hopeless, clumsy, crap. With thesaurus-rifling regularity Ed Miliband comes to PMQs and delivers a performance which is inept, useless, incompetent, maladroit, hopeless, clumsy and crap. The only virtue the Labour leader has is consistency. He’s consistently worse than last week.
In theory he should have scored some damage today. Unemployment is soaring. Growth seems grounded. Cabinet ‘partners’ scuffle in public whenever they get the chance, and Nick Clegg changes his mind as often as he changes his socks. And Miliband’s tactics had some merit too. By disinterring the PM’s New Year Statement from January 2011 he was able to open up the Coalition’s wounds and have some seasonal fun at their expense.
‘Coalition politics is not always straightforward,’ Ed quoted Dave as having said, ‘but I believe we’re bringing in a whole new style of government.’ Miliband paused to enjoy the laughter ringing out from the Labour benches. ‘A more collegiate approach!’ he added. This doubled the laughter levels. ‘I’m bound to ask the prime minister,’ said Miliband with cruel mildness, ‘what’s gone wrong?’
He can’t have imagined what was about to happen. Cameron affably re-tweaked his January statement. ‘Conservatives and Liberal Democrats don’t agree about everything,’ said the PM, ‘but it’s not that bad. It’s not like we’re brothers or anything.’
It was horrendous. It was like watching a moth flying into a flame-thrower. Miliband crumpled visibly while the guffawing Tories took their fill of merriment. The Labour leader’s hurt and shock seemed to spread outwards from his sagging head and to overwhelm his entire backbench deployment. Worse, he then had to stand up and try another question. Incapable, as ever, of out-thinking Cameron, he recited a pre-scripted joke about last week’s Save-the-Euro summit. The gag likened Nick Clegg to a cheated wife waiting for a phone call from her errant husband in the middle of the night. Quite a good quip too. On any other occasion it would have delighted his troops. But not today. It plopped noiselessly into an icy calm and sank to the depths of the cold sea-bed.
Cameron then pressed Miliband to tell us what he would have done at the Euro summit. ‘There was a better deal for Britain he should have got,’ insisted Miliband, matching the firmness of his voice to the vagueness of his answer. And he finished with a nostalgic jibe first coined in about 1848. ‘He thinks he’s born to rule. The truth is he’s not very good at it.’
‘Even that was recycled,’ said Cameron. He then delivered a scathing end-of-year report on Labour. ‘The fight back starts in Scotland,’ the opposition leader had claimed a year ago. ‘That went well, didn’t it,’ mocked Cameron. And he praised Miliband for uniting his party in their choice of Christmas present. ‘A new leader!’
Some commentators are hinting that Ed’s dead-duck routine will imperil his position sooner rather than later. Afterwards, on the Daily Politics, Caroline Flint was asked by Andrew Neil if Ed’s high-visibility hopelessness is demoralising the party.
The unlucky Ms Flint, apparently stunned by Ed’s latest world-class belly-flop, completely forgot to challenge the premise of the question. Where most politicians would have denied that their boss was a loser before offering him a few phrases of enraptured adulation, she merely informed us that Ed’s only job in opposition is to ask questions. That’s all. A fascinating omission.
Like her party, Ms Flint has attained a Buddha-like acceptance of Ed’s congenital ineptitude. Labour members seem drawn to something in his narrow, superior and scolding tone that will comfort them during their years of exile.
That will be the saving of him. Labour today has less even less appetite for rebellion than it has for office.
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