It is hard not to feel sorry for the ex-Cabinet ministers who have stayed on the Labour front bench.
It is hard not to feel sorry for the ex-Cabinet ministers who have stayed on the Labour front bench. A year ago newspapers hung on their every word. Now they are lucky to find themselves quoted in the penultimate paragraph of a news story. They are ranked somewhere behind Simon Hughes and right-wing Tory backbenchers on journalists’ call lists.
Why have they fallen so far? The simple answer is ‘the coalition’. Whenever the government issues a statement, the press’s first port of call is the other side of the coalition. In these circumstances it is very hard for Labour to make its presence felt.
It is almost as if the coalition contains both the government and the opposition. There’s no role for Labour to play. When he returns from paternity leave next week, this is the most urgent problem Ed Miliband must solve. He must find a way of making Labour relevant again.
Oddly enough, it was a Labour split that revealed just how far into irrelevance the party has fallen in the eyes of the media. Over the weekend, Alan Johnson, the shadow chancellor, made it clear in a succession of interviews that he didn’t agree with Ed Miliband on either making the 50p tax rate permanent or a graduate tax.
One would have thought this was a pretty big story: Labour leader and shadow chancellor at odds on fundamental policy issues. If such a difference had opened up between David Cameron and George Osborne before the last election, the story would have run and run. Even in the Tories’ darkest days, splits between their leader and shadow chancellor were news. When in 2000 Michael Portillo questioned William Hague’s ‘tax guarantee’, the leader’s commitment that taxes would always fall as a percentage of GDP over a parliament, it was a big story, with newspaper columnists lining up to take sides. But Johnson’s comments went almost unnoticed. It was as if no one cared.
This feeling of inconsequence is slowly enveloping the shadow Cabinet. They have a tendency to ask journalists, ‘how do you think it’s going?’, which translates as ‘Does it look as bad from the outside as it feels on the inside?’ For a party that has grown used to power, impotence and irrelevance are difficult to handle.
Ed Miliband has only been leader for 56 days, and he’s been on paternity leave for 13 of those. But already there are rumblings in Westminster about his lack of impact. Shadow Cabinet ministers want to know why he isn’t on television more; Labour backbenchers complain about ‘drift’. Even the party’s current lead in the opinion polls has not lifted spirits. Labour had hoped for a long honeymoon with its new leader. It has got the political equivalent of a weekend in Bognor.
Part of Ed Miliband’s problem is that a majority of his MPs didn’t vote for him and so don’t feel invested in him. When David Miliband turns up in Portcullis House, there is still a cadre of MPs who buzz admiringly around him. It is a sight to behold. David Miliband loyalists point out to MPs that he is among them. Female MPs come up to him, as they did during his leadership campaign, to receive a kiss on the cheek. Standing tall in a crisp white shirt, he is a living reminder to Labour MPs of what might have been.
Another problem for Ed is that the divisions in his internal coalition tend to mirror those of the government coalition. He can’t go after the Lib Dems as hard as he would like for their U-turn on tuition fees, because he doesn’t have a policy on the subject. He can’t get the shadow Cabinet to sign off on his preferred option of a graduate tax.
So Labour is left trying to oppose something with nothing. It is all too easy for the coalition to mock Labour with the line that its two parties have one policy on higher education funding, while the one main opposition party has two policies.
For similar reasons, Labour won’t be able to capitalise fully on the potential coalition split over control orders. David Cameron is reportedly fretting that the government is heading for a ‘f***ing car crash’ on this issue because the Lib Dem fifth of it is adamantly opposed to them while the Conservative Home Secretary is in favour. But Labour too has divisions on the issue. So, again, Miliband can’t go for the jugular on this without exposing his own party’s problems.
The Cameroons are watching Ed Miliband’s travails with interest. One Cameroon veteran has an intriguing piece of advice for Ed: ‘do more stunts.’ Getting yourself noticed is one of the most difficult things about being a new leader of the opposition. The stunts that Cameron did early in his leadership — cycling to work, hugging a husky — helped to get him on the news and define him in the mind of the public.
Certainly Ed Miliband has not played the media as well as Cameron did in the months after his election as Tory leader. Tory strategists couldn’t believe that Ed Miliband released the photos of him and his partner and their new baby on the same Wednesday afternoon that students were violently besieging Millbank. However cute the photos, they were never going to knock the rioters off the front pages. Back in the day, the Labour spin machine would have known this. The photos would have been released on Thursday.
It would be foolish to underestimate Ed Miliband, though. He has been written off before. Throughout his leadership campaign, the Westminster conventional wisdom was that he needed to go after his brother in a more dramatic fashion if he were going to win. Ed’s camp ignored these calls, stuck to its plan and won. The same thing could happen with the general election.
But even those close to Miliband don’t think that the current situation is sustain-able. One of those closest to the Labour leader has been briefing recently that Miliband will make three big announcements before Christmas to get the party back in the game. This is a dangerously close deadline to set the leader. Christmas is only three full news weeks away.
If Ed Miliband really wants to revive his party, he needs to answer a fundamental question: what’s the point of Labour when there’s no money left to spend? His political future depends on his ability to find an answer to this question.
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