Dodgy Business



Andrew Rawnsley painted a grim, yet accurate picture of the approach of Ed Miliband and the Labour Party as they gear up for next May's general election.

Eight months out the opinion polls all point to a narrow lead for Labour and the likelihood that Labour will emerge as the largest party, but with only around not third of the popular vote.

Contrast this with the equivalent situation facing Labour back ahead of the 1997 general election when the official opposition led by Tony Blair enjoyed a lead of more than 20 points before going on to win by a landslide. 

Labour is playing like a football team hoping for a dodgy 1-0 win

A flat and uninspiring conference in Manchester had none of the tingle of a party striding confidently towards power


By Andrew Rawnsley - The Observer
Speaking volumes: Ed Miliband makes his speech at Labour’s conference.Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA

People who don’t go to party conferences often ask: what is the point of them? Actually, people who do go to party conferences often ask the same. An answer I usually give is that part of their value is capturing the mood of a party.

I have been to triumphalist party conferences and I have been to suicidal ones. I have been to united party conferences where they couldn’t wait to get their teeth into the enemy and I have been to fratricidal ones where they couldn’t wait to get their teeth into each other.

The Labour conference in Manchester was none of these. It was a rather flat and tired affair, but it would not be fair to say that it was a gathering suffused with the gloom of a party bound for defeat. There were plenty of people with plenty of plausible explanations as to why Labour will win most seats next May. Yet they didn’t do so with vim. This conference entirely lacked the tingle that you’d expect from a party striding confidently towards power. One leading member of the shadow cabinet characterised the mood as: “Keep our heads down, don’t rock the boat. Shush. We can make it, but don’t tell anyone.”

The atmospherics around this strange conference didn’t help. The exertions of the Scottish referendum campaign had exhausted some of the party’s senior people and the fallout cast a long shadow over the beginning of the conference. Ed Miliband and his frontbenchers were put on the back foot over “English votes for English laws”. To that Tory gambit they responded with what one member of the shadow cabinet calls “wriggly” answers. The end of the conference was darkened by the war clouds of military action against Isis. The cramped financial circumstances in which the next government will operate also put the dampeners on the occasion. The most reliable way to excite the crowd at Labour conferences is to offer them a vision of the New Jerusalem, which is not an option when money is too tight to mention. One member of the shadow cabinet, who has had the memo from Ed Balls about no unfunded spending commitments, groaned: “We weren’t allowed to say anything.”

The tricky circumstances, along with it being the last conference before the election, put an even higher premium than usual on the leader’s speech. The faithful largely like Ed Miliband, but they worry about him and his dismal personal poll ratings. They were looking to be reassured that he can stand up to the onslaught on his character from their enemies and also hoping to be at least a little bit excited by the idea of a Labour government. His opponents were looking for him to cock it up. Unfortunately, his speech ended up being more of a pleasure for his foes than for his friends.

This was partly down to a basic failure of craftsmanship, which was the more surprising because the Labour leader has shown in the past that he can deliver highly effective conference performances. He received warm reviews, and not just from the sympathetic, for his 2012 speech on the theme of “One Nation”, a phrase that now seems to have been dropped in favour of the even blander “Together”. He set the political weather for weeks with the energy bill freeze pledge that he unveiled in last year’s speech. Encouraged by those successes, Mr Miliband and his team once again bet the farm on delivering a big hit. This time, the gamble did not pay off. He lost his way and lost his shirt.

Quoting random voters whom you have bumped into on your travels has become so overused as a device that it invited the mockery that it duly received. A ploy designed to authenticate the speaker by demonstrating that he is in touch with ordinary folk now comes over as just another form of political fakery, especially when all the voters you quote happily seem to agree with you and talk like you. If you are going to make jokes, they need to be crackers. Mr Miliband’s went off with all the fizz of a box of damp fireworks. If you are going to rouse the crowd, you shouldn’t have to repeat an applause line to prompt the audience to realise that they are supposed to be putting their hands together.

It proved to be a calamitous mistake not to use an autocue. “Many people told him not to take the risk,” I was told by one member of the shadow cabinet. “There were a number of people suggesting he deliver it from the lectern,” I was informed by one of the leader’s own circle. By the end of the week, it was hard to find anyone in Manchester who didn’t claim to have told him that this was a year to look prime ministerial at the podium. His own team were concerned that he simply had not had enough time to learn the speech properly. So it proved. He was so busy trying to recall the names of Gareth, Elizabeth, Colin, Rosie et al that he blanked when it came to delivering two absolutely crucial passages on the deficit and immigration. He realised his mistake as he came off the stage. According to one of his friends: “Ed knew he’d fucked up. He didn’t need to be told.”

As a result, the post-speech interviews that should have been an opportunity to expand on his “10-year plan” were instead a round of tortuous apologias for failing to remember two of the big issues that matter a lot to many voters and on which Labour is behind. The Tories will never allow him to forget that he forgot. Whenever the Labour leader tries to challenge David Cameron on the economy, the Tory will retort: “I am taking no lectures from the man who couldn’t remember to mention the deficit in his party conference speech.”

As striking, if not more so, was a deliberate act of omission. It came towards the end of the speech when he told the conference that “the next eight months represent my interview with the British people for one of the most important jobs in the country”. We know and he knows that the British people are a highly demanding employer and they are particularly hard to please in their current mood. They are telling pollsters two particularly wounding and personal things about Mr Miliband: few of them think that he is up to being prime minister and few of them think that he is capable of taking tough decisions. Fair or not – I’ve discussed before why I don’t think this is entirely just – that is what he is up against. So I was waiting for the “job interview” passage of the speech to address directly the doubts about him as a candidate for Number 10 and attempt to answer them. Instead of doing that, he moved swiftly on to another, less taxing subject.

Among solid Labour voters, the party’s appeal is strong enough to compensate for the anxieties about its leader. If you were a Labour voter before he stood up, his prospectus for a Miliband Britain was probably sufficiently convincing for you to remain a Labour voter by the time he sat down. What the speech lacked was any serious attempt to reach out to the unconverted. If you were a voter willing to consider Labour but not yet convinced, your doubts were not addressed by this speech.

The party has made a telling strategic choice to pile a lot of chips on the NHS as an election-deciding issue. The extra money pledged is not really the point. An additional £2.5bn in funding is a relatively trivial sum in the scheme of things; the purpose is to raise the salience of health as a subject in the minds of voters. I can see the rationale for this. Labour polls best on health. It owns the NHS as an issue in a way the Tories never can.

Lynton Crosby, the Tory election strategist, has reportedly told David Cameron that the Conservatives should stay off health because it is territory on which they will always lose. Labour people believe that going large on the NHS exploits a vulnerability of the Tories, binds defectors from the Lib Dems closer to Labour and helps to fend off Ukip’s attempts to siphon off Labour votes. Says one senior member of the shadow cabinet: “The people who worry about us on the economy and immigration are worried by the Tories on health. They are the same people.” Playing to a strength is the obvious advantage to Labour of majoring on the NHS.

At the same time, it is also a form of weakness. Labour is doubling down on an issue where it already has a massive brand advantage at the expense of addressing the areas where the party competes badly with its opponents.

Manchester did bring more clarity as to how Labour is hoping to win next May. Hang on to the voters who have fled to them from the Lib Dems. Expect Ukip to do continuing damage to the Tories. Lock in what they’ve got and hope that is enough to push Ed Miliband over the threshold of Number 10. It isn’t terribly ambitious; it isn’t very pretty; it might be enough. Labour is playing like a football team on a muddy pitch with a dodgy 1-0 lead and 20 minutes to go, praying it can hang on to its fragile lead until the final whistle, nervy that the game will be thrown away.

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