About as convincing as world’s fattest man promising to give up Pringles...

FOR four years Ed Miliband and Ed Balls have waxed hysterical about ‘the cuts’. They have thumped their brows with their knuckles, wailing that deficit reduction was ‘too far, too fast!’ They extracted mouchoirs and mopped their weepers at the Coalition’s efforts to reduce our country’s (only partlyreduced) national overspend.

George Osborne was denounced as the sort of bloke who ate ravens’ livers for his elevenses. Cuts were vampiric, ‘cruel’, and no shortage of Labour frontbenchers said so, from Andy ‘Buttons’ Burnham to monocled pipe-sucker Angela Eagle, from sea lion honker Rachel Reeves to Brideshead Revisited’s Tristram Hunt.

What a magnificent bunch! Aeschylus himself, staring at an empty page of goatskin vellum after another night on the ouzo in Athens c.500 BC, might have contemplated a scene of such prolonged breast-beating and told himself ‘don’t push your luck, Aeschy, baby – nothing could be that tragic’.

And so it has proved. Yesterday we were summoned to Chartered Accountants’ Hall in the City of London – pink lighting, fusion jazz – to hear Mr Miliband admit that, er, cuts were very much necessary after all. ‘I want to be sort of clear about this,’ he thundered.

Cuts were going to be imposed ‘when I become Prime Minister’. Mr Miliband explained: ‘We want to get the deficit down as fast as possible.’ Oh. So what were the last four years’ tantrums about, then? If it hadn’t been for you lot bleating so loudly, the Government could have made even more progress on the economy.

THE innocent voter may hear his words and think ‘he wants to scrap our debts’. Look more closely, children. He said ‘we want to get the deficit down’. Down might mean just a tiny bit. It might mean a lot. It is, for the politician, deliciously vague.

The chartered accountants, who presumably exist to help their clients avoid tax (something Labour deplores), clapped politely when he arrived. He walked right behind me on his way to the stage. I could hear him muttering to himself ‘thank you very much, thank you very much’.

‘My speech today is about the deficit,’ he began, reading from an autocue. He licked his lips and closed his eyes. When you see blokes doing that on a cross-channel ferry you tend to move to the other side of the reclining-seats lounge.

He has been to a new performance therapist. He looked hard to his left, so he was aiming at a Christmas tree. Next he swivelled hard to his right.

Now the hands were held wide. Now the fingertips were being pinched, and he was sploff-sploffing his words directly to a central camera, but pointing his eyes a bit too high, so it looked as though he was addressing the ceiling.

Mr Miliband grasps that he needs to persuade voters he is concerned about the deficit. But does he have the political courage to tell the electorate the extent of the cuts that are needed?

From yesterday’s speech he needed headlines saying ‘Ed gets real on deficit’. There

Vague: Ed Miliband yesterday was something about capping child-benefit and stopping rich OAPs receiving winter fuel allowances. He would save a few bob by scrapping police commissioner elections.

This was like the world’s fattest man promising to give up Pringles. At weekends.

The other political objective of yesterday’s speech was to give voters the idea that the ‘extreme’ Tories want to take Britain back to the 1930s (a comparison first mooted last week by the BBC – who had the idea first?).

HE talked of ‘a time before there was an NHS and when young people left school at 14’. All we needed was the Dvorak tune used on the old Hovis adverts. This week Labour demanded that Tories give details of their envisaged cuts. Mr Miliband was asked yesterday what cuts he would make.

‘Detailed work on spending reductions can only take place when we have the full resources of government at our disposal,’ he said. How terribly convenient.