There is a simple explanation for the febrile, nervous mood in the Labour party right now. And it doesn’t involve secret plots, feuding factions or vindictive Tory media. It involves The Great Escape. Remember the final reel? Well, Ed Miliband’s tunnel has come up short.
A quick recap in case you last saw the film on Boxing Day 20 years ago. The allied POWs have been digging for months. It has all been carefully worked out but it hasn’t been easy – there was that moment when the Nazi commandant found one of the tunnels, and the episode when Ives lost his nerve and tried to climb the barbed wire. But for the most part everyone has kept calm, stuck with the programme and now the moment has arrived. The tunnel is ready. It goes from under the prisoners’ barracks, beneath the camp fortifications and into the woods, from where the escapees can make a break for it.
Only there’s a problem. The calculations were wrong. The tunnel is 20 feet too short. It doesn’t come out in the woods, it comes out in the open well within view of the camp lights and the sentries. The prisoners can’t postpone the escape because their forged documents have that day’s date on them. It’s now or never. The choice is back to Stalag Luft III or a desperate dash for the woods, exposed to the enemy, with no cover and every chance of being mown down by machine gun fire.
And that’s where Labour are now. There are MPs who have long harboured doubts about Ed Miliband’s capabilities as a leader. They have questioned his policy choices (from left and right angles) and fretted about his lacklustre performances on stage and in the TV studios. But most of them could at least believe in the tunnel – the narrow passage to Downing Street, buttressed by voters who had abandoned the Liberal Democrats and carved through Tory-held marginal terrain where David Cameron’s vote is hollowed out by defections to Ukip.
It was never a very inspiring proposition, burrowing surreptitiously beneath public opinion; sneaking out of opposition with forged papers. Miliband’s aides always denied that their strategy relied on the tunnel. The preferred option was to march boldly to power, all guns blazing, beneath inspirational slogans of national renewal.
But, as opinion polls narrowed, the consolation was that the tunnel would still get them there in the end. Except it’s too short. Some of the Lib Dem switchers are drifting off to the Greens, or Ukip or who-knows-where. Some of the voters who backed the party in 2010, the diehard core that was meant to lay a 29-point concrete floor beneath Labour’s support, look less than solid. And, in Scotland it feels as if the ceiling is about to cave in.
Then there are Miliband’s personal ratings. Candidates and activists report a hardening of attitudes on the doorstep since May’s local and European elections. Before, people would complain that they didn’t know what to make of the Labour leader; he wasn’t a candidate they could get a purchase on and that made them wary. Now, I’m told, the mood has hardened. The benefit of the doubt is being withdrawn; contempt fills the gap.
Yet Labour MPs also know there is no simple mechanism for changing the leader, no obvious replacement and every reason to think that a messy effort at regicide would make the whole situation much worse. As one backbencher put it to me when I asked about talk of delegations or letters to persuade Miliband to stand aside: “Lots of us have thought about it at some point but then you war-game it through and realise it can’t work.” Reports of plots and pacts between shadow cabinet ministers are overblown – old rumour recast as news – but they express a real darkening of the mood.
Miliband’s leadership and potential successors are the inevitable topic of conversation whenever Labour folk gather in one place. While MPs know the right thing to do is “shut up, get back into the trenches, hold the line” (as one shadow cabinet minister pithily puts it) they can’t help thinking about life after Ed.
And, as one frontbencher explained to me recently, once you start thinking about it, the logical next step is to start organising for it because, if you know someone you definitely don’t think should be the next leader is preparing to run – yes, they’re talking about you, Andy Burnham – it makes sense to get active on behalf of someone else. Or at least to start considering who that someone else should be and contingency planning for the race.
But there’s a general election in just six months. And it’s an election Labour – ahead in most polls – could still feasibly win (or at least emerge with the most seats in a hung parliament).
So it’s the middle of the night. The party is crammed into one end of the tunnel, the documents are ready and the date is set. Escape from opposition is possible and this is the only way out. No turning back now.
But the tunnel is too short. They were supposed to be in the woods but the tree line is a full 20 feet away. That’s 20 long feet in the glaring spotlight, with heavily armed guards all around and the only plan left is a mad dash for it; every man for himself; try not to get killed; hopefully see you on the other side. No wonder they’re scared.
