There may be Trouble Ahead: The Election in Microcosm

14 March

 

• Ed Miliband reveals his election pledges before the start of the official election campaign.

 

• Labour appear to miss warning signs of how their opponents will fight that campaign.

 

• The lack of consultation and engagement with some Shadow Cabinet members becomes obvious when not all of them know how many election pledges will be unveiled.

 

• Those around Ed Miliband seem to be in denial about his lack of popularity.

 

 

IT COULD HAVE been called the Shadow Cabinet Express. Bleary eyed, I stumbled on to the 7.37am from Euston and looked for a quiet coach in the hope of catching a nap. Labour would issue their election pledge card in Birmingham today, a city where a Labour administration had seen off a Conservative–Lib Dem coalition. The vast majority of voters hadn’t yet engaged with election issues, parliament was a fortnight away from being dissolved, but for many of us in the media it felt like the campaign had been underway in earnest at least since the start of the year, and our enthusiasm was tempered with a degree of exhaustion.

In the same railway carriage, also seeking peace and quiet was the cerebral Jon Cruddas, Labour’s policy supremo. He was using the downtime to read a book on Irish history. But as peckishness began to trump the desire to narrow my sleep deficit, I made my way to what was once called a buffet but is now rebranded as the train ‘shop’ to pick up a bacon sandwich. Unlike Ed Miliband the previous year, I assumed I might have the luxury of consuming it minus the glare of publicity. But I put my breakfast plans on hold when I discovered that Cruddas was not a lone representative of Labour’s upper echelons.

There was something of the spirit of a Sunday school trip in the next coach which was jammed packed with relatively gleeful members of Labour’s top table and their advisers, no doubt full of anticipation at the unveiling of the fifth – and what was assumed would be the final pledge: Higher Living Standards for Working Families.

The small print repeated Labour’s promise to freeze energy bills – this had made the political weather when it became the centre point of Ed Miliband’s conference speech in 2013. But, oops – since then the ‘Big Six’ energy companies had been bringing prices down, partly aided by a concerned coalition government which had lifted some environmental burdens from their shoulders. Labour had to explain that their ‘freeze’ would now allow prices to fall, although not rise. This recalibration hadn’t been widely understood. So the pledge card didn’t just do the ‘vision thing’ – it included a new promise: lower fuel bills in time for the next winter, just so long as the regulator agreed. Cruddas would describe such initiatives – which were often politely referred to as ‘retail offers’ – in blunt terms as ‘small money bribes’.

* * *

Back on the Shadow Cabinet Express on a crisp clear day in mid-March, most of Labour’s front rank politicians appeared to be travelling hopefully. With such an emphasis on living costs, I asked the Shadow Transport Secretary, Michael Dugher if there was an edict to travel standard class at all times. He confided that he usually takes the car. Rather more significantly, and embarrassingly, one of his colleagues was wondering out loud just how many pledges Labour had. ‘Seriously how many? Is it three? Is it more than five?’

Perhaps someone hadn’t been paying attention. Or hadn’t been adequately briefed or involved. To maximise and elongate their impact, the preceding four pledges had been drip-fed to the media since January – starting with a commitment to balance the books. Much the same approach was adopted during the election campaign itself, when the party launched a series of topic-based ‘mini-manifestos’. Some of these might well have had an impact, but not necessarily the one envisaged by Labour’s strategists. But all that was in the near future. Labour’s more immediate challenge would be how to handle a pre-election budget.

So I stopped at the table occupied by Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper, who were discussing whether an announcement on the NHS should be brought forward if George Osborne attempted to occupy Labour’s territory by devoting more money to the health service. Deep in conversation, I was unaware of an approaching fellow passenger. ‘Excuse me!’ the middle-aged woman exclaimed. At first I assumed – or indeed feared – she had overheard the conversation and wanted to add her political tuppence worth. But it was much, much worse than that.

She was intimating that she wanted to pass down the corridor so I beckoned her on. ‘I can’t get past’, she said tersely, glancing briefly and disapprovingly in the direction of my expanding girth. I threw in the towel, pressed myself against an empty seat a little further away from the Balls/Cooper table and the frustrated traveller went on her way. I tried to resume a serious conversation until a few moments later history repeated as farce when the train guard – whose BMI made me look like a greyhound to his bull terrier – also exclaimed that I was blocking the passage. Ed Balls and myself broke in to laughter with the then Shadow Chancellor – whose waistline was on a similar trajectory, despite his regular and occasionally robust encounters on the football pitch – observing how there is often a gap between the perception we have of ourselves and reality. And this gap was to become a chasm for Labour during the campaign proper.

On arrival in the second city, I hitched a lift on the double decker bus that was laid on to take the Shadow Cabinet – minus Ed Miliband, who was arriving separately – the short distance to the international conference centre where the pledge card would be unveiled. I used the opportunity to discuss Labour’s prospects.

The consensus seemed to be that while Labour politicians weren’t receiving a hostile reception – at least in England – on the doorstep, there was a problem in motivating traditional supporters. This appeared to be symbolised by the turnout for the pre-election rally at which the pledge card would be highlighted on a huge screen, and its physical representation distributed to members and media alike.

1,500 activists had been expected to cram in to the hall but there was some consternation amongst officials when it became clear the venue wouldn’t be filled to capacity. Empty spaces were deftly consigned to an upper circle that was so high above the stage and the cameras that it was almost in orbit while some prominent politicians leaned against the walls of the stalls to give the impression that it was standing room only.

The atmosphere was upbeat. The event was hosted by Carrie and David Grant, stars of children’s TV series Pop Shop. That’s pretty much the only time my young offspring has been jealous of my job. But by far the best contribution came from actor Shaun Dooley. Star of Cold War thriller The Game and ITV’s dark drama Broadchurch, he was unexpectedly good at comic one liners.

He said he would hope that in the forthcoming campaign Ed Miliband would throw not just the kitchen sink, but both kitchen sinks, at David Cameron. This followed the not very helpful revelation that the party leader’s north London home – expensive enough to qualify for Labour’s proposed mansion tax on properties worth more than £2 million – had not one, but two, kitchens.

Ed Miliband and his wife Justine had been filmed for one in a series of BBC profiles of the party leaders. For reasons no more sinister than that of available light, and convenience for the camera crew, both sides had decided a little family kitchenette was the very place to conduct the chat. This room was apparently so poorly appointed that Sarah Vine – the Daily Mail columnist married to Michael Gove – denounced it as ‘forlorn’ and something that would be found in a communist housing project. Ed Miliband’s friend – and Times columnist – Jenni Russell leapt in to defend his middle-class honour, revealing on Twitter the existence of a ‘lovely’ kitchen elsewhere in the spacious Miliband home. Tabloid charges of hypocrisy and champagne socialism flowed, so Ms Russell had to clarify that you couldn’t even sit in the other, unfilmed kitchen – it was apparently a bit like the area where reporters made their tea at her newspaper – and she and the Milibands agreed the little, filmed kitchenette was the one they used regularly.

Now Ed Miliband was trying hard to motivate those voters who might well take great pride in fitting a new kitchen – but certainly couldn’t afford a couple of them, or whose houses simply wouldn’t be large enough to accommodate two cooking areas. So in a late addition to his speech, he stressed how all parties are not the same. He wanted to counter an anti-politics mood. But while the Conservatives were well aware of the dangers an incoming Labour government may pose to their traditional supporters, the potential beneficiaries of a change in power appeared to be taking some convincing.

But events outside the Birmingham venue were more significant than those taking place inside. And these should have rung alarm bells for the Labour leadership. First, a lone Sun reporter turned up wearing an Alex Salmond mask. He retreated following a minor and swift scuffle with an official. But one swallow doesn’t make a political storm. Soon, around 15 Conservative activists appeared with their faces covered by the image of the SNP’s former leader and carrying placards warning of higher taxes and spending if a Labour government needed propping up by a party which was campaigning against austerity, and a longer timetable for clearing the deficit. Unlike the loquacious Mr Salmond they remained silent and apparently impervious to any jibes thrown at them as they posed for the cameras.

This wasn’t any old stunt. Accompanying them was none other than the Conservative chief whip Michael Gove – a sure sign that this message that a weak Labour government could be pulled to the left by the Scottish Nationalists was going to feature prominently in the English campaign. Yet the reaction of Labour officials was largely to ignore this. One said he was ‘flattered’ Michael Gove had turned up: ‘He must take us seriously.’ There were to be regular appearances by the Salmond – and then Sturgeon – mask-wearers outside Labour events as the Conservatives found their attack resonated in the English marginals. The drip, drip, drip of this toxic message was never successfully stemmed, and in the campaign proper a torrent would flow. But something else was going on in the streets of Birmingham.

* * *

I was struck by the lack of Ed Miliband on his party pledge card. Labour’s first such device – back in 1997 – had a beaming Tony Blair all over it. Yet the 2015 version had just an unobtrusive signature in the bottom corner from Ed Miliband. BBC producer Sean Clare enlarged and laminated both cards and we went to test the reaction in the nearby marginal seat of Birmingham Yardley. Labour would win here as the seat was Lib Dem held and Nick Clegg’s party were on the verge of a near-total collapse, but would be less successful in the Midlands in those seats where the Conservatives were their main opponents. And the reaction to the pledge card didn’t augur well for the campaign when we stopped to question voters at random. It may well have been that Labour was preferred to the Lib Dems, but the lack of enthusiasm was striking. ‘God they are right to keep him off the pledge card – he is no Tony Blair’, said a middle-aged woman accompanied by her young daughter, who wasn’t interested in politics. Then a group of three women identified themselves as Labour voters. One of them felt a bit embarrassed to say she didn’t take to Ed Miliband but would probably back the party after all. A gruff middle-aged man absolutely wouldn’t vote for him no matter what.

As for the pledges, as a man in his 40s put it: ‘I would vote for those policies, yes. If I thought they would do them. But I don’t think any of them will.’ He told me he was old enough to remember the Blair pledge card. ‘Ah we were less cynical then,’ he chuckled. Times had changed. So Ed Miliband was – as he recognised – up against apathy, cynicism, even ennui with politics and politicians. This would lead him in the campaign itself to the front door of perhaps Britain’s most famous non-voter, Russell Brand.

But what of that other impediment to office – Ed Miliband himself?

Senior Shadow Cabinet members and advisers have said that the party’s own polling on the leader was too often kept from them – but what was being picked up in our vox pops was pretty much reflected in the pollsters’ findings. At this stage Labour had a target of talking to four million voters. If the activists on the phone banks and on the doorsteps weren’t hearing doubts about leadership, then they were deliberately putting in earplugs.

There had been serious discussions about whether and how to remove the party leader the previous autumn. The party’s unofficial in-house journal the New Statesman had featured an unflattering piece by its editor, Jason Cowley, which had been published – appropriately enough for something which lit a fuse on a plot – on 5 November. Cowley had talked about Miliband’s ‘appalling approval ratings and the lack of enthusiasm many of his MPs have for him’ and that

He doesn’t really understand the lower middle class or material aspiration. He doesn’t understand Essex Man or Woman. Politics for him must seem at times like an extended PPE seminar: elevated talk about political economy and the good society.

One former minister told me: ‘it crystallised what everyone thought.’ The former Labour leader Neil Kinnock spoke regularly to Miliband and on this occasion privately advised him to raise his game. Others thought the game was – or should be – up. At least two approaches were made to Alan Johnson to persuade him to stand if Miliband were ousted. Peter Mandelson had been approached by some backbench MPs to see if he could use his usually considerable powers of persuasion to change Johnson’s mind. Johnson felt a coup would play badly with the public – some of his colleagues believed the very opposite, but he was adamant he wouldn’t topple Miliband. And as no other viable candidate had been willing to put their name in the frame, putsch didn’t come to shove.

At that time disaster wasn’t absolutely certain. But the feeling was that much good work had been destroyed by Ed Miliband’s failure to mention the deficit in his ‘look, no notes’ speech at the previous year’s party ­conference.

Much has been written about this since – he had less time to rehearse as the conference took place so soon after the energy-sapping white-knuckle ride of the Scottish referendum. There had been a late addition to his speech on tackling ISIS. He himself had been mortified at his performance and had shut himself away in his hotel room.

And I know from the conversations I had, it wasn’t just the passage on the deficit that had been missing – much of what he intended to say on immigration was overlooked, too. And while saving the health service had been a prominent theme of what he had remembered of his speech, the more innovative policy of integrating social care was afforded scant mention and had largely been pared down even before trying to commit the speech to memory. But it was the lack of the D-word which inflicted the most damage.

In the following month’s private polling, the Conservatives had achieved ‘crossover’ – that is, they had now pulled away from Labour. And they would stay in the lead until March 2015. That same polling suggested that Miliband’s personal ratings had fallen to what one insider described as ‘near catastrophic levels’.

As one of his aides put it, the deficit hadn’t run through the speech like the words on a stick of rock. It could so easily be forgotten because it was a ‘bolt-on’ paragraph or two. And if his own advisers had been disappointed, some closer to the Shadow Chancellor were furious. A speech devoted to the deficit would follow that December but their feeling was the damage had been done. At least one of Balls’ allies had wanted ­Miliband ousted. But with no credible challenger, there was no challenge.

The perceptions of his leadership had improved by now, but from a very low base. So I had wondered if the lack of his image on the pledge card would be a sign that he wouldn’t be front and centre of the campaign – that more focus would be on the Shadow Cabinet as a whole. I was told firmly that this wouldn’t be the case. But another Shadow Cabinet adviser took the opposing view. ‘I can’t believe’, he said to me, ‘they are going to run this like a presidential campaign. Not only is he not a president – he is not a f***ing prime minister.’