Politics: Miliband’s Labour is in danger of becoming invisible

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.