I’ve been trying quite hard to come up with some imagery for just how bad Ed Miliband is at being in charge of the Labour party.
I’ve been trying quite hard to come up with some imagery for just how bad Ed Miliband is at being in charge of the Labour party. My best suggestion so far is that he’s leading as though he’s falling out of a building, desperately issuing responses and policy announcements before he hits the ground. It’s not perfect, I know. You’d want him to pass backwards through a hedge on the way down, ideally, and he’d also have to fall with petulance, which is quite tricky to visualise.
My point being, anyway, it’s not going well. Even when one makes an allowance for the hostile environment in which Miliband finds himself (one in which nobody voted for him, rates him or wants him) his performance, still, by any measure, is dire. There he stands, on TV or at the dispatch box. Collar skew-whiff, hair like a seven-year-old, droning on about whatever in that weird voice we never realised he had, which sounds like he has two tongues in his mouth each battling for supremacy. Did you hear him on the radio last week, doing that phone-in with Jeremy Vine? Dear God. To think that, only a few months ago, people used to talk about him as the more charismatic Miliband. It almost beggars belief.
Maybe we’re not seeing the real Ed, in the same way we apparently never saw the real Gordon. Although maybe we are. Because, really, we should have seen this coming. Remember his unofficial campaign slogan? ‘Ed speaks human.’ Was that really the best his supporters could muster? Not Ed is human, please note. That would be too much to ask. He just speaks it. But my mobile phone speaks Mandarin. Mr Spock spoke English. So bloody what?
As a Tory, one might feel tempted to gloat about this. That’s how it felt when the shoe was on the other foot, wasn’t it? When the Conservative party was led by that succession of incompetent bald men (I clearly remember two; were there more?) one got the sense that the Labour party were almost killing themselves with glee. Although speaking as somebody who isn’t quite a Tory, but is probably more one than he is anything else (Christ, Rifkind. Grow a spine), I actually feel closer to terrified.
Competent government requires competent opposition. Vince Cable may appear to be in the throes of an advanced midlife crisis right now, but one thing he said in his more recent spasms made a lot of sense. There is indeed an air of Maoist revolution about the coalition; simultaneous colossal upheavals in health, education, police, welfare, defence and everything else, where all that went before is suspect and must be swept away. Possibly they’re utterly on the ball with all this, despite in some cases only being Andrew Lansley. But equally possibly they aren’t, and the whole thing is heading, helter skelter, towards a scattergun blast of disparate disasters. It would be nice to feel sure that somebody else was paying full attention.
Who? The press? There’s a royal wedding in a few months’ time, hadn’t you heard? We’re busy with that. And the Lib Dems are all either in government or literally maniacs. It can only be Labour. But Ed Balls is sulking and Alan Johnson can’t count. Yvette Cooper doesn’t talk, Lord Mandelson doesn’t care, and Harriet Harman must surely be locked in a shed somewhere. It’s all Ed Miliband’s fault. He badly needs to get his act together, for the sake of the party. By which I mean the Conservative party.
Why do the police care so much about airlines? Inexplicable tradition. There was a story in the paper just the other day about a bunch of people kicked off an easyJet flight to Geneva. It was Boxing Day, and technicians (who clearly had whatever Alan Johnson has) had inadvertently put 10 tonnes too much fuel into the plane. The plane thus weighed too much, so the captain announced that 37 people had to get off.
Not enough people wanted to. They were on a flight, after all. People tend only to board such things if they are fairly keen on getting somewhere else. So airline staff told them that there were policemen outside, and if they didn’t get off, they’d be arrested.
What has it got to do with the police if people don’t want to get off an aeroplane they’ve paid to be on? Were they worried that some of these passengers were going to be so annoyed at not going to Geneva that they would, there and then, become terrorists, hijack the too-heavy plane and crash it into the nearest internationally recognised landmark? In Birmingham?
Not everything that happens on an airline is a matter of national security. Airlines carry an odour of self-important menace these days. I’m sure it’s new. In the new David Walliams/Matt Lucas airport comedy Come Fly With Me, there’s a stewardess who treats the merest murmur of dissent from her passengers as ‘air rage’ and gets them arrested. It’s not very funny, but it feels very true.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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