During one of the periodic plots to depose Harold Wilson when he was Labour leader in the 1960s and 1970s, he wittily crushed the conspiracy by declaring: “I know what is going on. I am going on.”
Over the past few days of agitation about Ed Miliband, members of the shadow cabinet have not achieved the same elegance when they have tried to kill stories that his leadership is under threat. “Total tosh,” says Ed Balls of reports that his wife, Yvette Cooper, is conspiring for the crown. “Idle speculation and nonsense.”
The shadow chancellor ought to have stopped at “tosh”. The more protestations that are loaded into a denial, the less believable it begins to sound. Andy Burnham, another alleged participant in the “Bonfire Night Plot”, dismisses suggestions that he and Ms Cooper have done a secret deal on the leadership as “pure fiction”.
As for Mr Miliband himself, he came up with the tortuous response: “I don’t accept that this matter arises.” He has been more vivid in conversation with friends who have heard the Labour leader describe it as “a tsunami of craperoo” got up by “a group of people who are desperate to stop me winning”. In our cynical age, these disavowals are taken as evidence that plot indeed there is.
There is trawling of the waters by Labour MPs who want Mr Miliband gone, but it does not yet amount to a concerted plot to topple him. It is notable that not a single Labour MP has actually gone on the record to proclaim that his time is up. Yet there is also no doubt that there is serious discontent and that it is damaging.
Long-simmering frustration and angst have been brought to a head by a confluence of forces and events. One was the Labour leader’s botched conference speech, which crystallised a lot of the anxieties about him as the party’s principal frontman. That would not have mattered so much had it not been accompanied by a melting of Labour’s national poll position. Not to be underestimated is the terror that has seized Labour hearts at the prospect of losing a shedload of seats to the Nationalists in Scotland. That increases the imperative for Labour to make good gains in England. Yet its support is also fraying south of the border. Perhaps most significant of all is the aftershock of the byelection in the Greater Manchester seat of Heywood and Middleton where Ukip, without putting in much effort, came within fewer than 1,000 votes of unseating Labour in one of its supposed strongholds. Leadership plots are often driven by MPs in marginals fearing for their skins. Here, a lot of the dissent is emanating from northern English Labour MPs, people who like to think of themselves as “no-nonsense Labour”, who believed they were sitting in safe seats and now fear they are not.
While none seems ready to openly flash the knife, it is not hard to find Labour MPs who are disgruntled with and despondent about their leader. Many are morose about the party’s prospects and some are mutinous enough to sign a letter urging him to go if such a letter ever materialises. But even they are conscious of the rule book that makes it very difficult to remove a Labour leader forcibly. Of course, if there was sufficient momentum behind a putsch, that obstacle could probably be circumvented. Where there’s a will to remove a leader, a party can find a way. Should a critical mass of Labour MPs declare they have lost confidence in their leader, he could not carry on. But then any plotters hit their second hurdle, which is the lack of an agreed candidate to take over and the absence of any sound evidence that any other member of the shadow cabinet would be doing any better.
It doesn’t flatter any of Labour’s frontbench that the person most talked about as an emergency draft is not a member of the shadow cabinet, but a 64-year-old retiree from front rank politics. That candidate is the eternally tipped alternative leader, the postman-over-the-water, Alan Johnson. He is the one person who, it can be plausibly argued, might improve Labour fortunes by enough of a margin for it to be worth the risk of Labour MPs attempting regicide six months out from a general election. There are plenty of things that should cause anxiety to Mr Miliband, but he need not lose sleep about a challenge from the direction of the former home secretary. What is the opposite of “burning with ambition to be Labour leader”? Whatever it is, that perfectly describes Mr Johnson.
There are quite a lot of people in the shadow cabinet who think they would make a more effective and more popular leader than the incumbent. Even if they did not have the vanity that usually comes with being at this level of politics, it would be hard for his colleagues not to think that they could improve on Mr Miliband’s dismal personal approval ratings. Whenever two or three Labour MPs are gathered, there are fairly frequent discussions about the identity of the next leader. But those conversations are usually predicated on a post-Miliband contest happening the other side of the election. What is striking is not how many of his colleagues are thirsting to jump into the job, but how very few seem to fancy leading Labour into the next election.
Mr Miliband and his loyalists – there are still some – rather angrily point out that the media and those MPs feeding stories to the newspapers are focused on the wrong leader. It is, after all, David Cameron who has lost two MPs to defection and fears losing more after the Tories have taken a second hammering from Ukip at the Rochester and Strood byelection. That’s a fair point. One of the consequences of the fragmentation of politics and the busting of the traditional red-blue duopoly is that the leaders of both the major parties can be in trouble at the same time. If you missed the current leadership crisis, don’t worry: another one will be along in a minute. But pointing to Tory woes is not altogether helpful to the Labour leader. It prompts the question: if the Conservatives are in such a mess, why aren’t you doing better?
There is fairly broad agreement in Labour’s ranks that the problem is not policy. Labour now has a raft of it, described in much more detail than is often offered by an opposition. Individual items of its prospectus usually poll well and it has been designed to appeal to the many voters who feel crunched by the squeeze on their living standards. Mr Miliband has a thesis about a “broken” economy that ought to be broadly appealing. Yet a lot of his target audience are instead telling pollsters that they plan to vote Green, Nationalist or Ukip rather than Labour. Says one member of the shadow cabinet: “For someone who sees himself as a transformational figure, this is deeply frustrating.” It also focuses Labour angst on its leader. If the problem is not the product, Labour MPs conclude that it has to be the salesman, a feeling inevitably sharpened by his dire personal ratings. Even Miliband loyalists now concede that he has a problem with what they delicately call “connection” and constantly discuss how he can “get permission to be heard”.
They gamely talk about trying to engineer a “moment of re-evaluation” when Joe and Josephine Voter will take a second look at the Labour leader, clap hand to forehead and cry: “Now I see it. He will be a brilliant prime minister.”
A lot of hopes are being pinned on the election TV debates as a chance for Mr Miliband to benefit from low public expectations by proving them wrong. The theory is that voters who only know him from brief clips on the news or deliberately unflattering pictures in rightwing tabloids will be pleasantly surprised when they see him speak unmediated and undistorted by a hostile media.
Among many things, this rather depends on the TV debates actually happening. Labour’s hope that they might be an opportunity for their man is one of the reasons for the Tories to try to find a way of making sure that there aren’t debates.
The most sensitive internal argument is about the role of the shadow cabinet. Many of its members have long complained that they are not allowed to say anything interesting because the leader’s office muzzles them or Ed Balls wields his spending veto. At the party conference, some were told to confine their speeches to just 800 words.
Senior Labour figures talk about fielding a “diversity of voices” to speak to the country. This is code for saying that they need to place less emphasis on Mr Miliband and dial up the amount of exposure given to members of the team. There has been a lot of resistance to this from the Labour leader’s inner circle on the grounds that it would be taken as an admission of failure and a concession that he is a weak frontman. This argument, which has been bubbling for months, is still not resolved.
The next election is winnable for Labour, but won’t be if the party starts to behave as if it has already lost. When the Tories want to make a dominant theme of their slogan “he’s just not up to it”, Ed Miliband can’t afford to have some of his own MPs saying the same.
