The Miliband camp can easily spin today’s YouGov poll, which Pete blogged earlier, showing that the Tory lead holds steady with Miliband as leader. They can say with some justification that the public has seen Brown doing the job and decided that he’s not up to it while they might warm to Miliband once they get to know him. More challenging for the nascent Miliband leadership bid is Labour’s electoral math.
If Miliband has set in chain a series of events that leads to Brown’s departure, then there will be a leadership contest. Huge chunks of the Labour party will not accept a Miliband coronation. At the moment, the talk is of a unity candidate—representing the left and the centre of the Labour party—challenging Miliband.
Labour elects its leader via an electoral college with a third of the vote going to MPs and MEPs, a third to party members and a third to the Unions. The first preference votes from the 2007 deputy leadership election give us a rough idea of where the ideological balance of power lies:
Benn—16.41%
Blears—11.76%
Cruddas—19.39%
Hain—15.32%
Harman—18.93%
Johnson—18.16%
If you consider that—in crude terms—Blears was the Blairite candidate, the Cruddas and Hain vote represents the left’s voting strength, Benn was the unity candidate and that Johnson and Harman represented the centre-right and centre-left of the party you see what a mountain Miliband has to climb. One Labour number-cruncher said to me yesterday that he couldn’t see Miliband getting more than 45 percent of the vote from the MPs and MEPs, 40 percent from the members and 20 percent from the Unions. Indeed, it is hard to see how Miliband wins in a two-candidate race without the other candidate imploding.
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