Today Ed Miliband headed for the favourite destination of faltering leaders: abroad. Any crisis-stricken banana republic will do. At PMQs the Labour leader decided that Egypt would fit the bill. Knitting his brows into a gap-year frown of munificent superiority, Miliband asked the PM to tell us how Britain is encouraging President Morsi ‘to secure a negotiated settlement in advance of the army deadline.’
Yes, Ed. Absolutely. The whole of Tahrir Square is hanging on your every word.
Cameron might have come clean at this point and told us what Ed was playing at: ‘I may not save Egypt from its looming civil war but its looming civil war may save me.’
Cameron didn’t, however. Bogus statesmanship is a plague no politician is immune to. The Tory leader duly adopted Miliband’s sombre but theatrical expression – they looked like a pair of cub scouts tutting over a poorly built campfire – and he told the world that he was appealing ‘to all sides for calm’. He added his wish that the current levels of violence would stop.
Will that work? It certainly will if the only goal is to appear authoritative and wise in relation to a problem where one’s wisdom carries no authority.
Miliband moved from the land of the Pharoahs to an even more ancient and intractable muddle – Britain’s education system. He accused Cameron of building good schools in places where Labour has already built plenty of bad ones. And though he uses the term ‘spare capacity’ to signify failure it amounts to the same thing. Parents shun lousy schools for the same reason they shun empty bistros, abandoned swimming pools and toy-shops that are on fire. Pretty simple, really.
Cameron could hardly believe his luck when Ed attacked him on education. Miliband has not only forgotten that his party created the free schools programme but he has yet to discover that teachers are not the universally admired figures they once were. Miliband doesn’t know this because he spends too much time listening to teachers.
Cameron spotted his opportunity here. He claimed that Miliband’s party is enslaved to the super-union Unite. And he joked that its leader, Len McCluskey, personally writes Miliband’s questions at PMQs. Cameron used McCluskey’s name five times during the session. This deliberate piece of product placement is excellent news for Len Mcluskey. And it’ll give the Tory heartlands a delicious thrill of horror.
McCluskey is a complex individual but his superficialities seem easy to read. With his designer stubble, his gangly, well-fed frame, his enormous earnings and his fashionably left-wing politics, he looks like Serge Gainsbourg’s art dealer. But then he opens his mouth. And that triple-thick Liverpudlian accent over-rides every other detail. To southern England he looks like a time-honoured object of hatred and revulsion: a dodgy Scouser on the make. Even better for Cameron, McCluskey is rather infatuated with his own publicity. And he’s prepared to boost his profile even if it means harming those he might be better advised to placate. Such as Ed Miliband.
Cameron read out a communique sent by McCluskey to the Labour leadership asking for ‘a firmly left-wing and class-based general election campaign.’
Cameron finished off the McCluskey sting by accusing Miliband being ‘too weak to stand up to the unions, too weak to lead his party, and too weak to run the country.’
Weak, weak, weak. We’ve heard that before. It was another wretched day for Miliband. And the Tory leader, who enjoyed strong support from former enemies like Peter Bone, swanned to an easy victory.
What should worry Labour is that when Miliband gets creamed at PMQs it no longer seems like news.
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