Believing your own hype is a dangerous thing in politics (and elsewhere). So is falling for your own spin. Spin is a message you craft that bears a tenuous link to the truth but is the line you want others to believe. You say it because something else is true, but it doesn’t suit you. You hope that the people you’re directing your spin at pick up at least some of its thrust and start seeing things the way you want them to be seen.
If the Tories fail to make it back into government after this general election, one of the things they will have to come to terms with is that they fell for their own spin about Ed Miliband, without realising that the public might not. The Labour leader is not so desperately awful that he cannot string a sentence together. He’s not even so desperately awful that he can’t hold his own in a debate where three of the other participants have planned their attack on him beforehand, and the fifth participant is so canny that he makes insulting the audience part of his attack strategy.
Last night Miliband looked like someone who had a good chance of being Prime Minister. He was calm and collected. He leant against the lectern casually as he delivered the sort of unimpressed looks that teachers spend years perfecting for classes of unruly 14 year olds. Throughout these debates Miliband seems to have been perfecting his Nick Clegg look: in the last debate, he stared down the barrel of the camera, as Clegg had done in 2010 (and has Gordon Brown had, rather expensively, been told not to), and in this debate he appeared as relaxed about what was going on as the Deputy Prime Minister had managed to appear in Salford two weeks ago.
The post debate polls were so enthusiastic that anyone trying to apply them to the national polls should season their analysis with a great deal of salt. And while Miliband’s personal ratings have been improving in the polls since the ‘debate’ season started, there remains a good gap between the Labour leader and David Cameron on the question of who would make the best Prime Minister. Candidates who were previously very downbeat indeed about their party leader have, though, in the past week or so, been telling me that they’re finding it easier to talk about him on the doorstep. They feel that the exposure has gone well, and some of them seem quite surprised themselves by this.
Miliband still has a great deal of heavy lifting to do before polling day. But he has shown over the past few weeks that the Tory image of him perpetually dropping bits of bacon out of his mouth and being unable to weather the tough world of politics is just not true. Which means his campaign is going far better than the Conservatives had hoped it would.
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