Why Dave should pray that Miliband doesn’t quit
There will have been cheers in Downing Street at the news that, despite some panic-stricken Labour MPs calling for his resignation, ed Miliband was staying put as party leader.
For the increasingly hopeless Mr Miliband is David Cameron’s most powerful not-sosecret election weapon in his fight to remain prime minister.
When harold Wilson was similarly said to have lost the confidence of the Labour faithful in 1969, he sharply retorted: ‘I know what’s going on. I’m going on!’ Mr Miliband, sadly, lacks both the wit and the stature to disarm his own critics so easily.
Since his pitiful conference speech and Labour’s plunge in the polls in its Scottish heartland, Mr Miliband looks like a loser.
What’s more, almost everyone in his party — apart from a clique of fellow pointy-head yes-men and women — now realises the truth. Former Labour spin doctor Damian McBride summed up feelings by describing the mood in the party as ‘black’.
Yet Mr Miliband seems in denial about the crisis, ignoring the party chairman’s admission that some MPs want him out.
Living in cloud cuckoo land, he imagines the future of Britain depends on him becoming prime minister.
Yet even his one-time supporters, such as the New Statesman magazine, savagely described Mr Miliband as ‘very much an old-style hampstead socialist’, adding that ‘he doesn’t understand the lower middle class or material aspiration. he doesn’t understand essex Man or Woman.’
As the journalist who first documented the stereotype ‘essex Man’ — to describe aspirational, hard-working people whose values were championed by Thatcherism — I know the damning verdict is true. The white lower-middle and working class of essex — and of other parts of the south of england, where Labour desperately needs to win seats — feel the party has nothing to offer them.
The fact is that Labour disgracefully neglected such families when it was in government — allowing mass immigration to reduce the number of available jobs and force down wages, creating a bloated state machine and abandoning countless thousands to a life of welfare dependency.
Privately there are many Labour MPs, fearing they’ll lose their seats, who say that if the general election were not six months away, they would try to depose Mr Miliband.
Desperation hasn’t reached the level, though, to trigger a serious plot. Not yet, anyway.
however, many Labour MPs are well aware that Mr Cameron would panic if Mr Miliband were to resign and be replaced by a popular figure such as former home Secretary Alan Johnson.
Although Mr Johnson protests he is not interested in the job, one of his friends tells me: ‘Alan can’t bear the thought of a contest ... but an unopposed coronation might be different.’
Mr Miliband’s personal failings apart, Labour’s problems go much deeper.
Most of its Shadow Cabinet elite — ed Balls, harriet harman, Yvette Cooper and Chuka Umunna — espouse metropolitan views that are semi- detached from the real world.
As for Mr Balls, his persistent, doom- laden predictions of an economic meltdown proved to be 100 per cent wrong. And don’t forget Labour’s stewardship of the NhS in Wales has been a disaster, raising severe doubts whether a Labour government can be trusted with control of the NhS in england.
A couple of years ago, when ed Miliband was experiencing an earlier version of this crisis, a gloomy Labour MP told me: ‘ed will have to be allowed to lose the next election.’ Given the way party rules have been written which make it fiendishly difficult to put Mr Miliband out of his misery, that prediction may yet turn out to be remarkably accurate — and save us all from calamity.