This piece of mine appears in The First Post/The Week.
Neil Clark: Ed has become the equivalent of Stoke City – we're told they have no style but they keep winning
HE'S A 'WASHOUT'. His prospects are "bleak". He's the man "with the word 'Loser' printed on his forehead". He's the geek "who can't even get being a geek right".
Reading newspaper commentators opine about Ed Miliband and his leadership of the Labour Party you'd think that the party had actually lost last week's Feltham and Heston by-election.
In fact Labour won it with an 8.56 per cent swing from the Conservatives. The party's share of the vote increased from 43.6 to 54.4 per cent and its majority rose from 4,658 to 6,203.
You can read the whole of the piece here.
2 comments:
This is absolutely right. On policies Ed Miliband is moving in the right direction away from the self-defeating delusions of New Labour.
Of course the right wing papers will try to depict him as a loser. There is something orchestrated about this - thye probably remember what was done to Hague and Duncan-Smith. Much has been made of Miliband's performance at PMQs but let's remember how William Hague regularly outperformed Blair at PMQs and it had little impact.
If Ed Miliband can improve his communication with voters without sacrificing authenticity he could become a formidable leader
These people’s preferred candidate, the man who devised the Coalition’s programme and then some when he was running Tony Blair’s Policy Unit but who could not get it past Gordon Brown, did not win.
His definition of Opposition, that the only problem with the cuts is that they do not go far enough and that we should already be at war with Iran because Israel says so, did not and will not prevail. Only his surname prevents his very necessary expulsion and that of his noisy but infinitesimal party within the Labour Party.
Since Ed Miliband became Leader, Labour has consistently been ahead in the polls apart from a blip, the first this year, after the insanely overhyped European veto that wasn’t. Labour has won five parliamentary by-elections in a row, the most recent, less than a week ago and after the EU carry on, with a swing of 8.5 per cent from the Conservatives, typical of the swings obtained in English by-elections under Miliband.
Miliband should remember all of this. He is clearly going to win. And when he does, he should regulate them all into oblivion. Such is their undeniable impact on public opinion that they might as well already be there.
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