The papers are full of Blairite warnings to Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham about the way Labour is campaigning on the NHS at present. Alan Milburn’s World at One interview gets a great deal of coverage, and just to twist the knife a bit further, the former Cabinet minister joins John Hutton to write in the FT that ‘if Labour is to win in May, the two Eds need to set the record straight and reclaim ground foolishly bequeathed to their opponents’. They’re talking about the economy, criticising the current Labour leadership for apologising too much for New Labour’s spending when the Tories supported it (a pithy line in the piece is ‘Mr Osborne cannot have been unduly concerned about Labour spending plans when in 2007, he committed the Tories to sticking to them’).
But though this gets plenty of attention in the media, the question is whether the increasingly public agitation of the Blairites will be given much attention by the Leader’s office. Lucy Powell dismissed Tony Blair as being from a different ‘era’ when he offered his own advice over Christmas, and Milburn and Hutton are also from that ‘era’ (which makes them all sound as though they should be being studied in part of the Natural History Museum rather than men whose ‘era’ came in the last couple of decades).
But those from the current ‘era’ are also agitated about Labour’s election message, which they fear is very critical of the Tories without being sufficiently excited about Labour. They may not surface with FT articles or Radio 4 interviews, but in private there is plenty of grumpy face-pulling and muttering about the current campaign. And so if every criticism is considered to be irrelevant as it comes from a different ‘era’, then the party’s own current players are being ignored too.
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