Labour types are in an aggressive mood this morning. Why are the newspapers and the BBC setting such store by just two MPs who apparently want their leader gone when the Tory party has around ten times that number of committed malcontents, they grumble? Peter Hain was particularly defensive this morning, suggesting that all Ed Miliband’s supposed woes are actually part of a plot by the Daily Mail.
First, here’s an attempt to explain the media excitement about the threat to Miliband. Both main parties are glum at the moment, partly because the polls suggest voters aren’t particularly inspired by either of them, and partly because they recognise that anti-politics parties such as Ukip, the SNP and the Greens are managing to attract voters they’d previously banked as ‘theirs’ without either big party really knowing how to deal with this threat. The bad feeling within each party ebbs and flows, and at least Labourites can look forward to the Rochester by-election on 20 November, where the Tories look set to lose a seat they were previously swaggeringly confident they could hold.
But the reason just two grumpy MPs apparently actively agitating for the leadership has received so much coverage is that for months journalists have been talking off the record to Labourites who are privately increasingly unhappy – and increasing numbers of them feel this way. Those two MPs, still anonymous, are just the tip of a very big iceberg of misery. Reports of unrest, though, may uncork the tensions in the party and lead to more MPs taking a calculated risk to speak out. Or, they may have the opposite effect and cause the party to band tighter together against what it sees as a hostile press out to get it. We just don’t know yet.
What we do know, or can at least be very confident of, is that there will be no serious leadership coup in Labour, or the Conservatives over the next few months. There may be those who try and end up looking like Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon, but in the end the vast majority of MPs in both parties know that the public would not reward a new leader of an obviously divided party at the ballot box. ‘We’ve left it too late, haven’t we?’ one Labour frontbencher unhappy with the leadership tells me. Meanwhile Tory MPs are happy to band together for Cameron for the next six months, but big beasts such as Liam Fox and Theresa May are already doing preparatory work for a leadership contest, and backbenchers openly joke that ‘we’re loyal until 7 May’.
Incidentally, from a media management point of view, grumbling a lot about persecution may help your followers to band together against an outside enemy. But it’s hardly going to reduce the hostility – and don’t forget that when Miliband has had good conference seasons and has fielded impressive frontbenchers, he has enjoyed good write-ups in the press. His energy price freeze, for instance, changed the terms of debate last autumn and even though many in the press disagreed with the proposal, most accepted that the politics of it were very clever indeed and criticised the Tories for being hopeless at responding.
The Tories have a hopeless few weeks coming up. Cameron’s Northern European allies aren’t exactly backing him up on freedom of movement and that £1.7bn European Commission bill. Rochester is just around the corner. Labour needs to band together to exploit that hopelessness and perhaps the bonfire night plot stories will help it do that. But if Miliband and his colleagues simply dismiss these stories as persecution from the right-wing media, they’re ignoring the fact that a big bulk of the party is unhappy and anxious about next year. Peter Hain this morning suggested the reports were just ‘Westminster bubble’ nonsense, but the misery comes from his own colleagues who do leave the Westminster bubble to stand on doorsteps and find voters complaining about Miliband. It would be an insult to those MPs to dismiss their concerns so lightly.
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