Memo to Labour: It’s not your leader who’s the problem, it’s your policies

WELL, this is a change. Normally it is the Conservative Parliamentary Party which behaves as if in the throes of a collective nervous breakdown. Now Labour MPs are displaying similar symptoms of panic and desperation.

This condition is caused — as you don’t need a doctor to diagnose — by the steady erosion of their party’s once solid lead in the opinion polls, combined with the equally steady approach of a General Election.

According to almost every Labour MP who whispers into the ear of a journalist, the only cure is for Ed Miliband to step down and be replaced by the widely liked Alan Johnson as Labour Party leader.

There are a number of practical problems with this apparently simple treatment.

First, Mr Miliband has no intention of stepping down, and the Labour Party doesn’t do regicide (and wouldn’t even if it had a leader called Reg).

Second, Mr Johnson has insisted that ‘for the avoidance of doubt, I have no intention of going back into frontline politics’.

Indeed, the former trade union leader’s lack of ambition to take charge of his party (or indeed to become Prime Minister) was demonstrated by his decision not to stand for the leadership after Gordon Brown stepped down.

Appealing

But let us suppose that neither of these were obstacles. Is it as obvious as Labour MPs seem to think that their troubles would be at an end with Alan Johnson magically installed in Ed Miliband’s place? Newspapers yesterday published polls from focus groups, which were, I am sure, commissioned in the hope they would provide the story that Labour’s chances would be transformed by a change in leadership.

The most exhaustive work was done by the Survation polling organisation for the Mail on Sunday. More than 1,000 respondents were shown short biographies and oneminute-long videos of the most advocated alternative Labour leaders: in this study Ed Miliband was compared with Alan Johnson, Andy Burnham, Chuka Umunna and Yvette Cooper.

Thus the appealing back story of Alan Johnson — which he has told brilliantly in two autobiographical volumes — was set out: ‘Former Labour Home Secretary Alan Johnson, age 64, was born in London. He was orphaned age 12 and brought up in a council flat by his elder sister. He attended a grammar school, left, aged 15, worked as a shelf-stacker in Tesco and as a postman.’

And Ed Miliband’s much less man-of-the-people personal history was also helpfully provided: ‘His father was a Marxist academic . . . he studied at Oxford, was a political adviser to Gordon Brown before becoming a minister . . . he defeated his brother, David, to become Labour leader.’

Now, for the results. In answer to the question ‘If there were a head-to-head contest between David Cameron as Conservative leader and Ed Miliband as Labour leader, how would you vote?’, 35 per cent said they would vote for Miliband.

And asked ‘If there were a head-to-head contest between David Cameron as Conservative leader and Alan Johnson as Labour leader, how would you vote?’ the percentage saying they’d vote for Johnson was . . . 35 per cent.

This is anything but proof of the proposition that almost all the pundits have seen as self-evident. It’s undeniable, however, that there has been a collapse in internal Labour Party support for its leader.

Most dramatically, the eternally Laboursupporting New Statesman, which had been almost alone in backing Ed Miliband for the leadership against his brother David in 2010, last week turned on its erstwhile hero. The magazine’s talented editor, Jason Cowley, wrote personally to declare: ‘Miliband is very much an old-style Hampstead socialist. He doesn’t really understand the lower-middle class or material aspiration. He doesn’t understand Essex Man or Woman . . . Miliband does not have a compelling personal story to tell the electorate as Alan Johnson does about his rise from an impoverished childhood in west London.’ Et tu, Jason?

This is tragi- comic, rather than merely tragic. The New Statesman is the magazine for old-style Hampstead socialists, with not the slightest interest in ‘lower-middle class . . . material aspiration’, let alone ‘Essex Man’.

That, presumably, is one reason why it found Ed Miliband so congenial in the first place. Now, of course, it is worried Labour will do very badly at the General Election in six months’ time, as almost all the party’s MPs are.

Yet Ed Miliband, awkward and robotic as he seems to be when interviewed on television or radio (or even when filmed eating a bacon sandwich), is not the main problem for Labour — as those Survation polling figures show. He has always generated dreadful approval figures on a personal level, even when the Labour Party was 10 to 15 points ahead of the Conservatives in the opinion polls.

No, the problem for Labour is that its fundamental proposition had been that the Government was engaging in unspeakably savage public expenditure cuts which would create mass unemployment on a scale not seen since the Thirties.

Back in 2010, Ken Clarke (then Conservative Justice Secretary) had declared with his customary insouciance: ‘If we turn the economy around, then we won’t even need a manifesto to win the next General Election.’ That may not be the case, but his general point was well made.

Dynamism

The more than two million new jobs created under this Government have completely refuted Labour’s assertion that the private sector could not begin to replace the losses in public-sector employment.

Historically, Labour has never understood the dynamism of the market economy, and has always overestimated the ability of governments to provide solutions for the public’s needs and desires: that is why it was so bewildered by the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe, with the fall of the Berlin Wall exactly 25 years ago.

Ed Miliband’s forgetting to mention the deficit, in his party conference speech, was indeed an indication that he still doesn’t take seriously enough the biggest problem with the British economy.

Yet this is a crisis which no one in the Labour Party is anxious to discuss. Collectively, it still seems to think — despite the state’s £1billion-a-week debt interest bill — that the answer to any problem is to throw more taxpayers’ money at it.

The public may not like the Tories very much: but most understand that the money — as the outgoing Labour Treasury Chief Secretary Liam Byrne admitted to his successor — has run out.

No wonder the genial and unconfrontational Alan Johnson does not want to take the hospital pass of the Labour leadership.