LABOUR ‘COMMITTING POLITICAL SUICIDE’
We will lose the election if you don’t stop sniping, Lord Kinnock tells plotters
is committing ‘ political suicide’ by questioning Ed Miliband’s leadership, the party’s former leader Lord Kinnock warned last night. The peer, a mentor of Mr Miliband, emerged to spearhead an effort to shore him up as allies issued an extraordinary ‘put up or shut up’ challenge to MPs undermining his position.
Mr Miliband’s new election campaign chief, Lucy Powell, admitted that briefing against him was leading to concern among voters ‘about whether he’s got the leadership qualities to lead his own party, let alone the country’.
She said of the plotters: ‘They need to decide what their plan is, and get on with it, either way. Show your colours.’
Labour endured claims yesterday that 20 shadow ministers will call for Mr Miliband to stand down if former home secretary Alan Johnson agrees to take over, and a poll showing his support among the party’s own voters is at an all-time low. Only 34 per cent of the ‘core vote’ which backed Labour under Gordon Brown in 2010 say Mr Miliband is up to the job of Prime Minister.
Mr Johnson said yesterday: ‘I am very supportive of Ed and I think he is doing a good job. But even if I didn’t, anyone who thinks that having a regicide six months before a General Election of your leader who is neck-and-neck in the polls and has the prospect of winning the election after one term in opposition, which has only happened once in 80 years, should get a grip.’
Critics privately suggest Mr Miliband has just weeks to save his job and a poor showing in the Rochester by-election on November 20 – a seat Labour held until 2010 on slightly different boundaries, but now looks set to finish third behind Ukip and the Conservatives – could tip him over the edge.
Former Labour MP Andrew MacKinlay said yesterday Mr Miliband ‘should go’ and would be removed by the end of the week if ‘one MP with the guts’ told him to quit, while Mr Brown’s former spin doctor, Damian McBride, added: ‘If anyone was prepared to come forward now and actually do a formal challenge, I think the Miliband camp would fold very quickly.’
Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk, named last week in Westminster as one of those pushing for Mr Miliband’s removal, said: ‘The numbers show us that he is not popular with the electorate and that’s the reality of it.
‘So, what we need to do is to spread the load amongst the Shadow Cabinet and push some of them to the fore. Let’s not believe that more Ed, as I have heard said, is the way to win in the General Election in 2015.’
Asked if Mr Miliband ‘has what it takes’, former Chancellor Alistair Darling, who backed Mr Miliband’s brother David for the party leadership, replied: ‘I think he does but he needs to show it. People want leadership.’
Mr Darling also criticised Mr Miliband’s mansion tax proposal, saying: ‘I suppose as a former Chancellor, I am not a big fan of new taxes.’
In addition, the Tories claimed that Mr Miliband’s 2013 announcement on an energy bill freeze could end up increasing family bills because some firms have already frozen prices until 2017 – despite the fact that wholesale prices are falling.
Shadow Cabinet minister Caroline Flint backed Mr Miliband but admitted some of her colleagues were having ‘jitters’. Education spokesman Tristram Hunt, a darling of Labour’s Blairite rump, dismissed claims he
‘Portrayed as weird, if you like’
had described Mr Miliband’s strategy for winning the election as a ‘total failure’ as ‘nonsense’.
Otherwise, there was an ominous silence from the senior figures in the Shadow Cabinet.
The job of leading the fightback was left to Lord Kinnock, still a toxic figure for many voters in Middle England, and former London mayor Ken Livingstone, who insisted Mr Miliband would become ‘the most significant Prime Minister since Margaret Thatcher’. He added: ‘My one criticism of Ed Miliband: he was far too nice to all the old Blairites that he kept on and they’re now stabbing him in the back. They’re complaining because Miliband’s moving us back to being a proper Labour Party.’
Lord Kinnock, putting on a bizarre Indian accent, quoted his newsagent as having said to him of the plotters: ‘What are all these crazy people doing to our party?’
He told BBC Radio 4 that the threat to Mr Miliband’s leadership was ‘not substantial’ but was causing ‘a degree of damage’.
‘As far as I can see, their tendency is towards political suicide,’ he said.
‘There’s no real substance in what they are saying. And the claims that they’re making, so far as you can identify them, are totally unjustifiable. Because after four years, Ed Miliband is a leader of proven courage, high intelligence, he’s got a great quality of leadership, of great leadership, which is being resilient, calm and defiant.’ Lord Kinnock admitted Mr Miliband was portrayed as ‘ remote, cerebral, weird if you like’ but this was ‘in total contrast with the man he really is’.
A source close to Mr Miliband said: ‘Given the relentless barrage Ed has had over the last two or three weeks, it’s not particularly surprising that his personal ratings are down. The truth is that despite a relentless hammering, we are still, on average, ahead in the polls and we are the only party that can reasonably expect to win a majority.’
Of the claim in the Labour-supporting Observer newspaper that 20 shadow ministers had turned against the leader, the source added: ‘I not only fail to recognise it, I specifically deny it.’