Ed miliband

Those months of campaigning have finally paid off for Dianne Abbott. She has been made a Shadow Health Minister – which resembles a proper job. She was against the Blair-Milburn reforms in the NHS, regarding them as too pro-market – so let’s see if she keeps this position in opposition, thereby throwing more soil on the grave of New Labour. One can imagine the fear running down Andrew Lansley’s spine at this new team: John Healey and Abbott. It’s just baffling. In the bars at conference last week, I met many Tories who are increasingly worried at the pace and preparedness of Lansley’s proposed NHS reforms. But instead of marking

The real problem for the Labour Party with the election of Ed Miliband is not the man himself, who is easy to like and, by instinct, a centrist politician from the New Labour tradition (however hard he tries to disown it now). No, the difficulty is the oddness of it the whole business. If the brother versus brother leadership contest had not been enough to cause the nation to raise a collective eyebrow, now we have the bizarre spectacle of a husband and wife taking the jobs of shadow home and foreign secretaries. This is just dead weird.  Every professional couple knows how difficult it is to hold together two

David Cameron was speaking in odd circumstances today. He was talking to a party that was back in power after more than a decade in opposition. But unlike Tony Blair in 1997 he couldn’t devote his speech to a celebration of that both because his party did not win a majority and because of the situation the country is in. To compound this, Cameron was speaking a fortnight before the spending review; further tying his hands in terms of what he could say.   Politically, the principal argument that Cameron wanted to make was about fairness. He was trying to move fairness from being purely about redistribution to one about

Perceptions count and the coalition are perceived to be vulnerable on crime. Its policy of reducing the number of prisoners on short-term sentences has been caricatured as a reduction in sentencing per se, a liberal assault on the consensus that prison works. I don’t agree with that analysis (which overlooks that excessive sentences in disorganised and overcrowded prison can create habitual criminals, who cost society in perpetuity thereafter) but readily concede that it’s easy to traduce the government as soft on crime, and I was surprised that Ed Miliband didn’t do so last week – as were plenty of Tories. In fact, opposition comes from within the Tory party, even from the

I’ve already mentioned George Osborne’s interview with the Telegraph, but it certainly merits another. As Ben Brogan says, Osborne is in a rich vein of ‘election that never was’ form. As befits the inveterate schemer, Osborne’s tactical grasp is impressive. He is quietly vociferous about Labour’s ‘historic mistake’ in electing Ed Miliband. Revealing senior Tories’ continued respect for the electoral tenets of Blairism, he says: “They have chosen to move off the historic centre ground of British politics. I’ve seen more pictures of Neil Kinnock on television in the past week than I’ve seen in 20 years. That’s old politics.” The old politics is the preserve of captive minds, wedded

Politics tends to ruin an evening in the pub. On Wednesday, I came across a friend who had been a card-carrying Lib Dem prior to the coalition’s formation. He confessed that he’d been impressed by Ed Miliband’s speech and had joined the Labour party. Several other Lib Dem supporters attending agreed that Ed Miliband is a more attractive option than David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Everyone else in this small band (mostly unaffiliated voters with the odd furtive Tory) believed that Labour has probably elected the wrong Miliband, but were antagonistic to Labour in any case. Politics Home has published formal research suggesting that only Lib Dems clearly favour Ed

I had expected Ed Miliband to do pretty well in the polls. He’s unknown, and voters haven’t had a chance to dislike him yet. That’s not an insult – familiarity breeds contempt in politics, and the public are normally quite quick to give a new guy the benefit of the doubt. Witness the Clegg bubble. But tomorrow’s Guardian shows precious little sign of a conference bounce. The two parties were level before the conferences – a remarkable achievment for a leaderless party. The Tories took three years to do the same. It was one of many reasons that inspired our cover story last week, “Labour leaps forward”. The illustration, by