Should Miliband be embracing his inner geek?
Ed M’s team has been giving some thought and training to the Labour leader on how to walk exuding confidence and how to sit in interviews. The evidence of the latter was very visible in the Marr interview.
Ed M looked a wee bit starchy and uncomfortable sitting bolt upright at the beginning but maybe he’ll get used to it. Towards the end of the interview he relapsed into something I suspect the trainers had made great efforts to stop – answering questions with his eyes shut for prolonged periods.
Ed M has decided not to try to live down the geeky, academic persona but to trade on it – the video has his Harvard pupils praising him, one referring to him as “Professor Miliband” (that I predict will be used mercilessly by opponents judging that the public wouldn’t trust a “Professor” with their bank balances or crime policy).
Ed M even went on this afternoon to introduce an hour long dissertation on market society by a Harvard professor. You can see Ed the Movie – an attempt to tell voters an appealing story about the Labour leader – here.
Some feel that the biggest challenge for Ed M is to improve on the abysmal figure of 16 per cent – that’s the number that thinks he couldn’t be trusted to take tough decisions. His admirers respond that Ed M took on the Murdoch empire, is now taking on the banks. But Labour critics on the right say these are – for all the risks involved – targets in the Labour comfort zone. We thought we heard Ed M tip-toe out of that comfort zone yesterday when he said he couldn’t guarantee he could unpick the Lansley NHS reforms. But on Marr today he rowed back on that.
Counter to that, Ed Balls has been poking parts of the Labour movement in its comfort zone. You pick up genuine anger amongst the trade union bosses – it spurred the Len McCluskey quotes in the Sunday Times today. The union bosses thought they had an agreement after Ed Balls’ earlier “no u-turn on coalition cuts” remarks (I paraphrase them) that the leader would rein Mr Balls in. They now think that Mr Balls was panicked by a recent poll suggesting Labour didn’t have credibility on the economy and rushed out straight out the door talking about the need for “ruthless” cuts.
The unions will fire a shot across the leadership’s boughs when it defeats them on an Unison amendment on public sector pay tomorrow. Where it all goes from there, who wins the battle over whether Labour should shadow Coalition spending levels into the next Parliament, is unknown but is shaping up as just about the most critical Labour policy battle in the coming year.
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